250.000 quids?
That's a small account, in Oracle terms at least. If the Architect expected to spend 30.000$ (at least from what I understand from the article) he probably did not either understand Oracle's licensing scheme or just the level of transaction he was going to undertake.
No wonder a bunch of sharky Oracle account managers did not take him seriously; probably (they are trained beasts) they smelled a rat in advance and thought they should have not give him much of attention.
The article is not wrapped in the appropriate context: for what I can read FTD wasn't already an Oracle customer or, at least, this project wasn't based on an existing one. Mr. Weiss lacked eventually the necessary knowledge to evaluate an Oracle-based solution if not a solution at all. Helpful EnterpriseDB's people pushed the decision process in their favor (which, from their side, is perfectly compliant with competitive behavior).
But I see a problem here.
This guy seems to have based his decisions on pre-sales vendor ability to deal with him and his apparent ineptitude: he did not think about scalability, life-span of the solution, economy in terms of necessary personnel, security, compliance, technological impact (backups for example), interoperability, application support (acquisitions did well to Oracle, customers of a certain size enjoy enormous benefits by referencing one supplier instead of three) and so forth.
At least this is the impression I get.
Nothing against EnterpriseDB: I love the suite and I am sure they are carving their place in the DB arena. It's just that I completely do not agree with Mr. Weiss motivations.
Answering to the previous post: Oracle is expanding its user base: it does not seem to suffer any major setback from their acquisition strategy.
Globalizing economy has provoked a raft of consolidations: companies desperately need inter operable systems and standardization; Open Source is not (yet) there at an enterprise level and the perception is that the Open Source thing does its job for certain infrastructure projects but when you talk core business or sensitive data....Well you know the names.
GaB