It's good that more companies are adopting free software, but most of them do not, in turn, release their core applications as free software. This indicates they do not value freedom more than they value saving money.
Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software
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Re: Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software
#32My reaction to this article: Mwahahaha. Although surprised it is Cassandra, and not mysql thats taking the market share. Is there some technical reason for this? I'm not intimate with what Cassandra offers.
Cassandra is a distributed database that easily scales more or less to infinity. As you add more nodes to a cluster, it automatically redistributes data throughout the cluster. It "just works", and that's pretty exciting. So Cassandra at the moment seems to be enjoying a bit of the hype cycle that MongoDB enjoyed 5 or 6 years ago. It's the thing that everyone wants to try out and get onto their resume at the moment.…
> Cassandra "just works"
It's hard for me to believe statements like this. At this point, I think the only things that "just work" are gravity, relativity, and modern CPUs.
I recommend this talk on Scaling Pinterest http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Pinterest
Re: Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Companies value safety over risk Yes. In the case of a database, "safety" is safety from downtime, data loss, data theft. So companies want a database that is fault tolerant and secure. > Postgres might be good enough for Imgur or Joe Bob's Bait Shack And Social Network, but neither of those is a bank, healthcare provider, or an entity capable of ordering an air strike. Banks and healthcare providers strike me as f…
6 years of AT&T under my belt, Enterprise operates differently. They don't care about what postgres or EC2 or whatever can do, it's all about not doing anything that someone can point a finger at you for later. Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM, Oracle or Microsoft. Also, companies that supply software to corps also supply something that's probably more valuable than the software itself. Support & Maintenance ag…
Nothing about EC2 precludes it from offloading accountability from its clients to itself. Amazon operates infrastructure for the CIA. Consultants are plentiful and cheap. Amazon can provide handholding-as-a-Service just as well as Oracle. At some point, Amazon may invest more resources into its service business. But now it makes sense to grow its platform. That is the difference in Amazon vs Oracle model. Amazon is platform first, Oracle is service first.
When Amazon competes with Oracle on service, what value will Oracle have to provide? Amazon is far ahead of them in platform, and catching up in service is easy. Oracle would have a much harder time doing the opposite.
Platform-first business model is quickly displacing service-first business model. Build a large customer base, use it as proof of ability to scale, then charge enterprise customers for concierge service.
EDIT: keep in mind we are discussing an article about oracle's declining sales.
Re: Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software
#34Good. Now my concern is to see what database platform all the architect astronauts end of gravitating their ridiculously over-engineered solutions towards. 5 years ago, the default choice for my government clients was Oracle, Oracle, Oracle. I just finished up a year-long engagement and Oracle wasn't brought up even once.
I've noticed a lot of MS SqlServer being thrown at larger systems.
Re: Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
6 years of AT&T under my belt, Enterprise operates differently. They don't care about what postgres or EC2 or whatever can do, it's all about not doing anything that someone can point a finger at you for later. Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM, Oracle or Microsoft. Also, companies that supply software to corps also supply something that's probably more valuable than the software itself. Support & Maintenance ag…
Nothing about EC2 precludes it from offloading accountability from its clients to itself. Amazon operates infrastructure for the CIA. Consultants are plentiful and cheap. Amazon can provide handholding-as-a-Service just as well as Oracle. At some point, Amazon may invest more resources into its service business. But now it makes sense to grow its platform. That is the difference in Amazon vs Oracle model. Amazon is p…
All this stuff you're saying is possible and may very well be true eventually, but not in today's Enterprise-world.
On Enterprise-planet, all this "Cloud" talk is scary and you can't quickly conceptualize PCI compliance with some computer in the sky somewhere; nor can you conceptualize who/where a consultant will be to fix your problem immediately if a problem arises. Your IT department are a bunch of inflexible people who refused to learn anything beyond what they were using 20 years ago and will tell you "Cloud isn't safe! Didn't you hear on the news how such-n-such got hacked?" I have no problem accepting that you're right; I'm just telling you that Enterprise-world doesn't care how right you are. Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM, Oracle or Microsoft. There's no thought-process beyond that point. You join the company, learn how they do things and do your best not to rock the boat or suggest any new fancy things that might make your coworkers antiquated skillset obsolete... or you will be back-stabbed.
Re: Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
6 years of AT&T under my belt, Enterprise operates differently. They don't care about what postgres or EC2 or whatever can do, it's all about not doing anything that someone can point a finger at you for later. Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM, Oracle or Microsoft. Also, companies that supply software to corps also supply something that's probably more valuable than the software itself. Support & Maintenance ag…
Nothing about EC2 precludes it from offloading accountability from its clients to itself. Amazon operates infrastructure for the CIA. Consultants are plentiful and cheap. Amazon can provide handholding-as-a-Service just as well as Oracle. At some point, Amazon may invest more resources into its service business. But now it makes sense to grow its platform. That is the difference in Amazon vs Oracle model. Amazon is p…
Amazon does not provide SLA agreements at all. I don't think people are necc. disagreeing with your vision of how things should be, but the fact is, enterprise software just doesn't work the way you're describing.
Re: Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software
#37This is the headline I expected to see 10 years ago.
Re: Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
A number of reasons that form an important lesson in sales at the enterprise level: 1. Oracle does provide value. They have clustering and high-availability offerings that Postgres just can't touch, and those come with service and support personnel as part of the contract. A one-stop solution is a powerful sales pitch. 2. They have a massive existing install base within the Fortune 500, which spend amounts of money t…
> Companies value safety over risk Yes. In the case of a database, "safety" is safety from downtime, data loss, data theft. So companies want a database that is fault tolerant and secure. > Postgres might be good enough for Imgur or Joe Bob's Bait Shack And Social Network, but neither of those is a bank, healthcare provider, or an entity capable of ordering an air strike. Banks and healthcare providers strike me as f…
> Eventually EC2, Google Cloud, etc will overtake Oracle completely. Maybe if Oracle is lucky they can provide the overpriced consultants to manage their client's EC2 boxes.
Oracle is an option in AWS RDS, though I'm not sure what the instance count is relative to the other options.
Re: Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software
#39My reaction to this article: Mwahahaha. Although surprised it is Cassandra, and not mysql thats taking the market share. Is there some technical reason for this? I'm not intimate with what Cassandra offers.
Hiya. I wrote the article (for verification see Twitter handle @mappingbabel). In poll of 20 $1bn> startups vast majority used MySQL, though I saw a few mentions of Cassandra and MongoDB. Additionally (though not really DBMS) tons of ElasticSearch and Redis. We pull out Cassandra DB specifically because we were able to find a reasonable price comparison example for it (most people I spoke to were just rolling their own MySQL rather than going to a vendor).
Re: Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software
#40"Doesn't cost anything": This is a meme that is largely false.
Any large organization will buy support for open source software which can sometimes be actually more than the cost of a database license (see Datastax and Cassandra).
License, support, take your pick. It takes people to keep systems running.