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Oracle’s Cloudy Future

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Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#101

Post by treehau5 »

makomk wrote: post #100
latj wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of large U.S. organizations wont use software they cant buy support for. So, you can use RedHat and buy support. When you create software, your developers are going to use all kinds of tools, libraries, etc. and depending on the policies of the organization they are going to want to manage that risk. For example, if you're a bank and the devs who make your mobile app use some random authentication library that…

Part of the reason that Postgres is popular is that there are multiple companies selling support for it, several of which are also major contributors. So there's actual competition to keep prices somewhat under control.

Yeah, don't remind me. I still have nightmares from my experience with Enterprise DB from my last company.

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#102

Post by dkarapetyan »

SEJeff wrote: post #98
dkarapetyan wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's not wrong. He brings up several good examples and how "cloud computing" is basically meaningless. He says they're gonna change the marketing to be "cloud computing" friendly since both gmail and salesforce are considered "cloud computing". In that world Oracle DBs are also cloud computing.

Oh I don't disagree. Just found it amusing the change of attitude.

He's not dumb. He's a very competent businessman. He's not gonna let a 2009 Q/A session get in the way of getting more money just so he can be consistent about ragging on "cloud computing".

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#103

Post by vgt »

mwnorman wrote: post #36

(long time ex-Oracle employee ... take with whatever size grain of salt you wish :-) As the article mentions, Oracle aims primarily at its own installed-base, which limits how much "innovation" they can do .. can't piss-off the paying customers! Their world-view is incredibly narrow ... years ago they discovered that even though they have millions of paying customers, there is a core of only about 5000 customers that…

Very timely:

https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/09/global-historic...

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#104

Post by nickpsecurity »

scholia wrote: post #76
nickpsecurity wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget the original reason: backward compatibility with complicated, mission-critical software on weird hardware nobody can legally clone. These businesses would have to port all their stuff to avoid IBM. They probably don't even know what it does. So, they stick with them to mitigate that risk.

Plus, the time to transition off it is far longer than the next quarterly results. It may well be longer than the expected tenure of the CEO....

Great point. They are short-term focused most of the time.

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#105

Post by pjlegato »

oblio wrote: post #28
abakker wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For many people in IT, generally not the Hacker News crowd, but the guys in the trenches of [insert corporation name here] with ops in many countries, The Money is NOT really the important thing. Risk mitigation by having a passthrough to the big IT vendors is what they are paying for specifically. I work in the IT consulting / business research space. In our surveys, "vendor viability" is a frequent concern, and the…

Well, thing is, Open Source is changing that proposition. As long as you're prepared to be conservative in your choices, something like Debian + Apache + OSS programming language will likely be around 20-40 years from now. When is the last time an OSS programming language that took off actually died? For example, even though it's not as popular Perl 5 is still used professionally in many environments and as far as I…

It's not about whether the technology will die per se; it's about whether they are contractually guaranteed that there will be a professional support team in place to support it for X years, and whether the vendor's ability to fulfill that contract over the long term is perceived as realistic by the client.

Consulting mailing lists and IRC for a DIY solution is not an acceptable solution for most enterprise users. Moreover, there's nobody to sue if something goes wrong.

Red Hat was formed to fill that gap, but so far it has had only modest success. Companies like IBM, HPE, and Oracle exist because they are perceived as stable, likely to be able to support their technology over the long term.

For example, mainframes and COBOL are largely long dead technologies, but banks that bought mainframes running COBOL from IBM in the 1970s are still very much getting active commercial-grade support for those technologies from IBM today.

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#106

Post by pjlegato »

treehau5 wrote: post #101
makomk wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the reason that Postgres is popular is that there are multiple companies selling support for it, several of which are also major contributors. So there's actual competition to keep prices somewhat under control.

Yeah, don't remind me. I still have nightmares from my experience with Enterprise DB from my last company.

I'd love to hear more about this. pjlegato at databaselabs dot io

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#107

Post by pjlegato »

PetrolMan wrote: post #18
gizmodo59 wrote: post #11

A genuine question: If you have worked with any fortune 500/1000 companies (Lets pick non software based companies) either directly or if they are your customers, how many of them use Oracle database or SQL Server? Some of the reasons why this trend WILL continue: 1. Critical software like databases needs support. To the point where there should be someone who can come on premise to fix things. 2. We need to use X be…

My company nearly had #2 pushed on us. We've been using Postgres and there is no solid reason for us to switch but a consultant came in an suggested Oracle just because all the big boys use it. That argument has a measurable amount of sway for some reason.

It's because nobody ever got fired for choosing Oracle. If anything goes wrong with the database, it's Oracle's fault.

The boss finds that proposition attractive, because the alternative with in-house databases is that it's the boss' fault.

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#108

Post by pjlegato »

dkarapetyan wrote: post #102
SEJeff wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh I don't disagree. Just found it amusing the change of attitude.

He's not dumb. He's a very competent businessman. He's not gonna let a 2009 Q/A session get in the way of getting more money just so he can be consistent about ragging on "cloud computing".

^^ The difference between management and engineering.

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#109

Post by athrun »

toyg wrote: post #67
jdcarter wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oracle selling higher-end products as a service makes total sense, and I agree, the subscription model has potential to make them a good deal of money. What I'm getting at, however, is why are they so aggressively taking on Amazon in the IaaS space? That's the part which doesn't make sense on the surface--they show up late and then attempt to compete on price. Since when has Oracle competed on price? The conclusion I…

There's another thing that is specific to IaaS: auditability. Part and parcel of Oracle's business model is sending goons to count your servers running this or that appserver, and invariably telling you are not paying enough in licenses. A serious cloud-based architecture that can scale up and down at will (which is what you would deploy on AWS) is fundamentally non-auditable, because it can be scaled down to minimal…

Not sure about auditability. If anything, IaaS is more auditable since everything is traceable.

Additionally, AWS will provide partner ISVs with detailed reports on how customers used their products over a given billing period.

That being said, this transparency might be an issue for Oracle as it limits their usual predatory sales/auditing practices.

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#110

Post by kstrauser »

rb808 wrote: post #44
gizmodo59 wrote: post #11

A genuine question: If you have worked with any fortune 500/1000 companies (Lets pick non software based companies) either directly or if they are your customers, how many of them use Oracle database or SQL Server? Some of the reasons why this trend WILL continue: 1. Critical software like databases needs support. To the point where there should be someone who can come on premise to fix things. 2. We need to use X be…

We use Oracle. When starting a new project you are told to use Oracle because that is strategic plan of the company. There are teams of Oracle specialists in house that assist us. There are Sybase, SQL Server apps around but would ideally be migrated. I think its probably time to move off to a free open source platform like PostGres, esp for non critical apps. Don't underestimate the power of corporate support. I had…

The support point is well made, but IBM isn't doing that for free: you're paying them enough that they're eager and able to do so. I'd wager that EnterpriseDB would do the same if you threw sufficient money at them to fix a PostgreSQL installation.
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