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Oracle’s Cloudy Future

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Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#111

Post by matt_heimer »

andrewbinstock wrote: post #68
rb808 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This! Enterprise DB vendors like Oracle will send a team of engineers to your site and work with you until the problem is solved. For IT managers, knowing they can rely on this level of commitment is something they will happily pay for.

With Oracle that team is know as the A-Team. http://www.ateam-oracle.com

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#112

Post by dmourati »

pinaceae wrote: post #32

Good article, but misses the point on Oracle's risk against AWS. Understandable as Ben is more focused on consumer stuff. Oracle's main money maker is their database product. Running on prem, collecting money through license and maintenance contracts. The more DB installs out there, the better. Salesforce uses Oracle for their backend. But here's the rub - as a SFDC customer, I do not care which DB is running below i…

Correct. Amazon understand this dynamic and how to play the game. They can take something like Oracle's DB, turn it into a service, and manage it end to end for the customer, and even provide tools to do the migration. This is a straight attack on Oracle. Once in the AWS ecosystem, it becomes easy to follow the logic described in the CIO using MS products in the article.

One real risk is lock in. Larry has been harping on this. The counterpoint, of course, is if you are running on the best platform, lock-in is not a problem because you don't want to switch.

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#113

Post by dmourati »

bduerst wrote: post #97
colemannerd wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and the point of the article is that they're light and provide no where near the optionality and features of AWS.

Amazon doesn't really have a PaaS though, right?

One could argue the entire suite of AWS products make up a PaaS. One could also argue that Elastic Beanstalk is their standalone PaaS offering.

https://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#114

Post by DashRattlesnake »

abakker wrote: post #50
oblio wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Open source may perpetuate, but it is the on-call, active support that enterprises value. You can't exactly demand prompt action from the support forums, can you? Now maybe open source like Red Hat works that way, but it is very much the commercial terms and operating models that businesses are interested in. Again, for innovative new projects, this is changing.

You can't necessarily demand prompt action from a big vendor like Oracle, either.

Years ago, I worked on a project that used Oracle's BPM product. It was the only time I've worked on something where the team had a direct line to vendor support. When we had issues, all they ever seemed to do was ask for more logs, over and over again. I think they were hoping we'd give up and close our SRs.

Luckily, I got off that project pretty quick. I later learned that they 1) rewrote their BPM product and did not offer a clear upgrade path to the new version, and 2) planned to end support for the old version in a few years.

As a developer, the promise of vendor support doesn't ease my mind very much.

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#115

Post by intended »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #81
ubercode5 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. However one additional thing to keep in mind in the COTS vs FOSS is if there is some bug that affects the company and requires attention. The company doesn't generally have the engineers on staff to actually change that software, and there's no guarantee that the associated FOSS community will prioritize the bug. With a COTS solution, you can pick up the phone and call the support team. Generally my company…

Indeed. It seems that the most sustainable business model for Open Source so far is a combination of FOSS product + paid support / consulting company. It has some potential conflict of interest (e.g. deliberately not improving some aspects of the product that brings in support calls), but being a successful open-source product often depends on outside contributions which themselves depend on reputation, and that may…

That still doesn't work because the core issue is partially addressed.

Reliable on call support. Oracle is not going to vanish overnight or de prioritize you due to lack of resources.

The possibility of that risk in other firms is sufficient to make them non options

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#116

Post by AndyNemmity »

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…

I've worked with a ton, and they are moving from Oracle/DB2 to SAP HANA, but I work in the SAP ERP space, so that's not indicative of the broader world I don't think. Just the trends here.

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#117

Post by AndyNemmity »

zigzigzag wrote: post #77
erikpukinskis wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, IT managers like Oracle because they can pay someone else to do their job for them? What are they getting paid for then? They take the TPS reports from the in-house engineers to the Oracle managers? They're people people?

Almost all companies need databases. Very few companies can or want to hire highly skilled database engineers with years of experience of debugging and performance profiling complex applications.

Right, when I go to major client sites, often their people don't know anything about databases really. It's in some random city, and they hire the people that are local.

You get very wildly different levels of skill, and many times very low levels of skill. Then they hire consultants, because we can make the thing go.

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#118

Post by AndyNemmity »

kstrauser wrote: post #110
rb808 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I doubt it, there are a ton of things already in place due to the size of the companies that you get essentially for free.

Like COEs, and all sorts of other things that a EnterpriseDB can't compete with due to the money involved. It just isn't the same.

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#119

Post by nickpsecurity »

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.

Me too as I was considering pitching them to Oracle shops. My email is in profile.

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#120

Post by AndyNemmity »

b2m9 wrote: post #4
tmptmp wrote: post #3

I am happy Oracle is losing this battle (edit: or at least feeling the heat), one sort of personal reason is that they have killed/crippled many open source projects. Other reason, they are gaining money mainly because there are enough fools around running big corps, who can conveniently pass the buck if something goes wrong. Similar is true for MS too. But if you really want to see your money well spent, Oracle is n…

> Other reason, they are gaining money mainly because there are enough fools around running big corps, who can conveniently pass the buck if something goes wrong. Well, this can be said for any big business software company. It's the same story with SAP, IBM and friends. Business software is simply not about spending money well.

People say that a lot, but I work with customers all the time who are very happy with their solutions. I don't disagree that some people hate them, or hate this or that ui, but I can think to many companies/interactions with people that love the products.

That's never really expressed places like here. It's just "not spending money well", when I think there are legitimate positives to a lot of business software.

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