

Why Oracle May Really Be Doomed This Time - tluyben2
http://pandodaily.com/2012/02/11/why-oracle-may-really-be-doomed-this-time/

======
steve8918
I don't think Sarah Lacy knows very much about enterprise software sales
cycle, or the concerns of enterprise customers.

When you have enterprise customers, their tolerance for downtime is extremely
small. When you become big enough, your IT infrastructure becomes a
competitive advantage. Maybe more accurately, the C-level executives _believe_
that their IT infrastructure is a competitive advantage, and they will
continue to spend money to maintain the status quo. They believe they can't
afford to outsource things like CRM, IT Service Management, etc. And
enterprise software companies exploit this belief, and extract billions of
dollars from them through software upgrades and service contracts.

I worked for enterprise software companies, and I scratched my head wondering
why companies kept spending so much money on mediocre software. And it's
exactly the old adage from the 80s: "No one gets fired for buying IBM". When
you buy Oracle/Siebel, no one will question the status quo. If you throw out
Siebel and switch to Salesforce, and Salesforce suffers a 3-day outage much
like EC2 did last year, then your head is on the chopping block. That's why
CIOs like Oracle.

Now the one thing that Oracle has to really worry about is new companies that
never grew up on Oracle, that grow big, like Facebook, Google, etc. The new
multi-billion-dollar companies will balk at the idea of spending millions of
dollars a year on database licenses, but as long as the enterprise companies
are still around, there's more than enough money to sustain Oracle for a long,
long time.

------
mickeyp
A lot of people seem to miss the point about enterprise software and the
purveyors of that software; the end goal is not agile or slim (that is
incidental) but to enable many, many disparate systems to function at least
somewhat coherently. Probably on a level that boggles the minds of most people
who have never worked in a large enterprise.

Big businesses end up with lots of disparate technology because they consume a
lot of software and it creeps its way into the business by way of developers
wanting to play with tools; some C-level moron making 'strategic' decisions;
or real demands of the business. But unless you're the technological masters
of the universe (like Google) the idea of replacing something wholesale is a
recipe for disaster once it's entrenched: it's expensive and what would you
replace it with? Who out there can furnish an accounting system that works
across 40 different countries that also ties in neatly with a company's
logistics or shipping department AND comes with consulting and bespoke
development services to handle the 50 billion edge cases that each big
business has? This is not a simple problem. This very same thing happens
amusingly enough just as frequently in startups and SMEs, but on a different
scale ("Oh we couldn't use Mongo, it didn't fit our needs, so we rolled our
own -- but then we had to use Frob X and Widget Y and patch it up with
Python")

That's why tools like Oracle RDBMS come with such a kitchen sink variety of
tools and features.

For instance, I once had to do some reporting and OLAP work across multiple DB
systems and stuff the data into an Oracle instance. Unfortunately said systems
used a mixture of Oracle, Sybase and MSSQL (oh the wonders of maintaining
shrinkwrap products...) so we bought a database link for Sybase and MSSQL so
we could query the databases from inside Oracle using two-phase commit. Sure,
each adapter cost us $15k but so what? That's pocket change compared to the
hackneyed approach of using some external, asynchronous batch job. All this
money and patchwork effort in the name of report generation -- but that's all
businesses care about.

------
lnanek
I feel a lot of the pain he mentions. I remember designing a SOA system many
years ago where transaction sharing across web services would save a ton of
effort writing the rollback logic that would be needed otherwise. Went to the
Oracle web site and saw it supports WS-*, awesome! That must include WS-
AtomicTransaction and whatnot. Went to a solution specialist and he said sure
you can do transaction sharing! Just export your EJB as a web service and use
JTA! Fire up the technology and get things running - not supported at all.
Research a bit more - more technical Oracle employees on official forums
pointing out it isn't working either. Ugh. They wasted so much of my time by
lying and saying they supported something they didn't back then. Definitely
not happy with those old crappy systems the article makes fun of every couple
paragraphs, nor the whole sales culture where they try to sell me something
that doesn't actually fit my needs.

------
foobarbazetc
Argh. Pando Daily again.

I don't know how a site can be _worse_ than TechCrunch, but they've managed
it.

------
Mark_B
Oracle is entrenched far too deeply within the inner workings of IT operations
of corporations worldwide to ever truly be doomed.

