I watched from the sidelines with grim interest as my organization tried to decide between Oracle and SAP.
The team defined requirements, ran an RFP and demo process and did site visits to clients of each company. The SAP reference clients weren't exactly thrilled with SAP, the product was too complex and too expensive, but it was rock solid and SAP was a reliable partner. The Oracle reference clients had the usual complaints about features and flexibility, but their real beefs were that Oracle was a predatory and untrustworthy partner.
Oracle made claims in their RFP response that were proven false in the demos and site visits, confirming the claims from reference clients about the company's ethics. In contrast, SAP's RFP responses were validated by the team's due diligence.
So management decided to go with SAP. In response, a senior Oracle person tracked down all of the company's board members and made outrageous claims of incompetence against the company's executives, and alluded ominously about bad faith and conflicts of interest.
Oracle was completely hostile and off the rails when they figured out they lost the deal. I will never, ever do business with Oracle.
Unfortunately, while the SAP application seemed solid, the organization went with their HANA database which was astronomically expensive, and had a bad habit of returning different and provably incorrect results to the same deterministic SQL query every time it ran, and then the entire database would crash for all users.
It's wild dealing with Oracle. They are an adversary to their customers. They'll repeatedly try and setup meetings where they begin off-topic asking questions about how many cores/sockets you're deployed on (Answer: Fewer than we're paying for). When we declined their Java subscription (after thorough preparation on our part), they repeatedly threatened us with audits and ominous threats of download monitoring.
If anyone has to deal with this, I highly recommend Palisade Compliance for consulting. Ex-Oracle people who do not sell licenses, only consult on compliance and represent you during an audit.
Nvidia is adversarial too, and a giant pain to deal with. But then since the 1980s there's been a slow pendulum move to suppliers having more actual and self-perceived power over customers. I'm a big proponent of respectfully letting the supplier know when needed I tell them they don't me if I am satisfied or whether its worth the $ spent on them. Always have options. Without options there's no choice. Internal suppliers (in a corp) periodically need to be told the same thing. Mishandling one's customer power in the relationship is an error i don't like to make.
> If anyone has to deal with this, I highly recommend Palisade Compliance for consulting. Ex-Oracle people who do not sell licenses, only consult on compliance and represent you during an audit.
Oof. That's a new standard for shitty company: when ex-employees build a business around protecting customers from their former employer.
You’re going to have to elaborate on that last bit! SAP HANA is used by enormous organisations as the core database for their entire operations, so pervasive data corruption bugs would be rather… concerning.
This was in the early days of HANA, I'm sure they've fixed the defects by now, but it was shocking to pay nose-bleed prices for every 64gb shard, and then have basic SQL return provably incorrect results. It was a catastrophe, and after spending heavily on consultants to work around the defects, the organization eventually switched to SQL Server.
It's like the Linux fanboi stating without evidence that Windows will just accept any user name without a password, and then refusing to elaborate on that claim. Like... wat?
SAP HANA may have its faults, but I've never heard of pervasive data corruption as one of them.
> It's like the Linux fanboi stating without evidence that Windows will just accept any user name without a password, and then refusing to elaborate on that claim. Like... wat?
The team defined requirements, ran an RFP and demo process and did site visits to clients of each company. The SAP reference clients weren't exactly thrilled with SAP, the product was too complex and too expensive, but it was rock solid and SAP was a reliable partner. The Oracle reference clients had the usual complaints about features and flexibility, but their real beefs were that Oracle was a predatory and untrustworthy partner.
Oracle made claims in their RFP response that were proven false in the demos and site visits, confirming the claims from reference clients about the company's ethics. In contrast, SAP's RFP responses were validated by the team's due diligence.
So management decided to go with SAP. In response, a senior Oracle person tracked down all of the company's board members and made outrageous claims of incompetence against the company's executives, and alluded ominously about bad faith and conflicts of interest.
Oracle was completely hostile and off the rails when they figured out they lost the deal. I will never, ever do business with Oracle.
Unfortunately, while the SAP application seemed solid, the organization went with their HANA database which was astronomically expensive, and had a bad habit of returning different and provably incorrect results to the same deterministic SQL query every time it ran, and then the entire database would crash for all users.