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back to article Surprise! No wonder Oracle doesn't 'see' IBM or SAP in the cloud

At Oracle’s recent OpenWorld conference, Larry Ellison asserted: “We never, ever see IBM” or SAP in the cloud. Perhaps because, according to a senior Oracle insider, Oracle still isn’t doing much in the cloud. How much is “not much?” As InfoWorld reported in an interview with this unnamed source, in 90 per cent of Oracle’s …

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  1. K

    I see Oracles ploy..

    Give it away free, customer don't even know its there and don't use it.

    1 year later, they invoice the customers Finance team which is located in another country, doesn't have a clue about it, just sees "Oracle" and assumes its a utilised service and proceeds to make payment.

    11 1 Reply
    1. Lou 2
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      Happy

      Re: I see Oracles ploy..

      Quite a few vendors have done that (MS$ included). Now if they just remember to act on the strategy, steer the customer to start using it and keep the wolves from the door - lock in and upsell! Hard to compete with "free" if you are trying to get a real product in because procurement will always refuse to sign off the purchase of a new product if it is already in house.

      Of course they trust Sales to remember they have the hooks in and execute the strategy as they have already been paid on the free sale - there should be a KPI that the customer actually deploys Oh wait Oooooo - shimmy stuff ...

      0 0 Reply
      1. midcapwarrior
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        Re: I see Oracles ploy..

        That's why MS changed the compensation to "lighting up" the cloud buy instead of "purchasing" the cloud.

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      2. Hans 1
        Reply Icon

        Re: I see Oracles ploy..

        >Quite a few vendors have done that (MS$ included).

        No, MS sales droids are a little "more virtuous", they throw in $500 000 cloud services, let the customer know saying this is in order to get the $3 000 000 discount, and don't pocket the accelerator (afaik). For each of these deals, one should take discount+gratuitous cloud services ($3 500 000 in this case) off of MS' official cloud revenue.

        Another dirty trick MS is doing is counting MS Office revenue as cloud revenue.

        So slightly unfair, here, to single-out Oracle here as selling "vapour" when Microsoft is doing exactly the same thing.The only real cloud business is Amazon, at the moment.

        1 0 Reply
  2. Steve K

    Check the fine print on duration!

    Check the fine print on the duration of your cloudy contract too - at least with some products you sign up for a 3-year lock-in to your "cloud" deal.......

    2 0 Reply
  3. jazzjaffa

    Not quite accurate

    Whilst much of the article above is correct there are some points that I need to raise.

    I worked at Oracle for over 11 years left 10 months ago. I was in Sales and worked on some of the early PaaS sales. The first correction is there was no way a customer would sign a contract with out understanding all the products on that contract - we could not just slip a PaaS product into the mix and hope no one noticed. Customers were large enterprise accounts with numerous resources and a good knowledge of Oracle practises and contracts, they were not idiots.

    Many customers understood this was a new product line and were willing and happy to get an opportunity to look at something that might in the future be a more meaningful option for their business.

    Generally there was a good business case for the client to use PaaS when looking to buy a large chunk of on premise software. For example If we identified a deal of say £2m of on premise software for a customer we could then ask we would ask the customer if they would prefer to pay £1.5M for the software and £500K for PaaS - in doing so they would spend the same - effectively get a bigger discount on the on Premise Software but (and here is the key) there was no maintenance on the PaaS element so they save 22% on the initial purchase and every year thereafter. Plus there would be a "lump" of PaaS they could use for a whole range of things. So in summary I think the article was a little harsh and made it sound as though Oracle were selling PaaS with stealth - that was just not the case at all. All the customers I sold to, did so with complete understanding of what we were doing and the benefits to them.

    11 1 Reply
    1. Lou 2
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      Thumb Up

      Re: Not quite accurate

      Truly ingenious - the real deal Trojan horse. Masterful strategy - nothing beats savings on maintenance to confuse and lead the customer up the garden path. And all legal - well played but just shuffling discounts - its all in the wrist .

      2 1 Reply
    2. Gerhard Mack
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      Re: Not quite accurate

      My employer is being sold a "cloud" service by Oracle where the actual meaning is that they maintain a colocated machine for us for a price that's more expensive than buying new hardware and paying our developers to finish migrating our software off Oracle.

      Oracle is not a company that gets the concept of cloud computing.

      1 1 Reply
  4. Tom 13

    Re: We are in the middle... of a generational shift

    The only people who believe this are the n00bs and the fools who will chase any pot of gold.

    Those of us who've been around for a while know we see this sort of major announcement about once every 10 years with and echo about every 5. They change the marketing buzzword of course because the name under which it was originally sold is mostly a swear word in IT circles: outsourcing.

    10 0 Reply
  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Oracle is trying to sell SUN hardware for storage!

    [Have to post anonymously due to content of comment] Recently I was contacted by an Oracle salesrep who wanted to sell storage. Ex-SUN storage. Ummmm, that's hardware, not cloudy at all! My company is shifting to cloud storage as fast as we can, as our old hardware continues to age. The salesrep keeps trying and trying. I take it from her efforts that Oracle still doesn't get cloud storage, they're still trying to sell in the old model. Good luck to that!

    0 3 Reply
    1. Victor 2
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      Re: Oracle is trying to sell SUN hardware for storage!

      By the looks of it, the problem is you do not know what a cloud is, and even less a private cloud...

      2 0 Reply
    2. Joe 35
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      Re: Oracle is trying to sell SUN hardware for storage!

      Why are you wasting both your time and hers, and not telling her "we are buying cloud storage now" ??

      Oracle arent just selling "in the old model" (and there are customers still buying "in the old model" BTWso they'd be mugs to stop selling that ! ), they will sell on premise, public cloud and indeed private cloud, if that floats your boat. same as do IBM I'm sure.

      It does require an intelligent customer with the wit to ask though.

      1 0 Reply
  6. Stretch

    Seems to me there is a lot of money to be made in finding the next buzzword after cloud and flogging it to these guys.

    7 0 Reply
    1. Justin Clift
      Reply Icon

      Re: Stretch

      Seems to me there is a lot of money to be made in finding the next buzzword after cloud and flogging it to these guys.

      Something like "Space" will be the next buzzword.

      For example, first there were patents. Then the same ones redone "on a computer", then recycled to "on the internet", now its "on the cloud". Next it will be "in space".

      Musk and related are getting the foundation tech build now. Once that's working... expect "in Space" to be the Next Big Thing (really).

      1 0 Reply
  7. Terafirma-NZ

    If we all spin up as much resource as possible under the included PaaS contract on their cloud running some random workload tests would the result be a complete TITSUP for the Oracle cloud? Would be funny to see all the shouting that would happen only to find it was for workload simulators.

    0 0 Reply
    1. Amorous Cowherder
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      No, you'll just get charge per CPU/sec per core you invoked, per GB/written to storage and per MB/upload\download. Then a nice fat bill will arrive!

      0 0 Reply
    2. Anonymous Coward
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      Anonymous Coward

      I would have thought that the contract would specify limits as to how much you could use. Also, I don't think they allow load testing or security/pen testing.

      0 0 Reply
    3. Joe 35
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      You can use as much as you've paid for. Fill your boots !

      The only shouting would be your manager when he discovers what a wheeze you thought it was to spend the entire budget on a joke.

      0 0 Reply
  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I was thinking the same thing. Amazon and MS Azure probably almost never see Oracle in the cloud either.

    0 0 Reply
  9. Anonymous Coward
    Unhappy

    looged, left top says, Hi, myself, and could not post a comment

    0 0 Reply
  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Do I c myself?

    0 0 Reply

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