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Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software

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Re: Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software

#81

Post by davidgerard »

noonespecial wrote: post #51
CyberDildonics wrote: post #4

I don't even know how Oracle is still the juggernaut that they are. A $10,000 dollar computer running postgres can serve a ridiculous amount of queries. I suspect the general idea is to spend huge amount of money to run incredibly inefficient SQL queries.

You don't pay Oracle for a database. You pay them for a kind of lawsuit insurance policy that just happens to come with a database. It looks like they sell software but I think it closer to the truth to say that they are an insurance company.

Straddling the fine line between "insurance company" and "protection racket".

Re: Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software

#82

Post by davidgerard »

tsotha wrote: post #71
anaolykarpov wrote: post #58

I see this phrase repeated over and over: nobody got fired for chosing Oracle, ibm, or Microsoft. I wonder: did anyone got fired for chosing Postgres, Linux, or even new and risky stuff like Mongodb or nodejs? And being told at their exit interview "you should've decided to use Oracle"? I guess tech people are fired for lack of talent in hustling company politics much often than they are for chosing a technology.

It's not so much that someone will say "you should've used Oracle". It's that when your application is down for two days they'll say "you should've picked a vendor with 24 hour support and good penetration in the job market". Now, your Oracle-hosted application might go down for two days as well, but then people would shrug and say "sometimes this happens." To be fair to Oracle, though, it does seem to happen less of…

Oracle's database itself is superlative. It's just everything else about dealing with Oracle.

Re: Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software

#83

Post by davidgerard »

meesterdude wrote: post #14

My 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.

Postgres is at last eating Oracle from the bottom up, doing what MySQL tried to do fifteen years ago and wasn't quite technically up to.

We're busy replacing our Oracle with Postgres. It's just ridiculously more agile. Actually-good databases without having to think about licensing? Heresy!

Re: Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software

#84

Post by calgoo »

smtddr wrote: post #35
chatmasta wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 peop…

I work for a semi large Network and Hosting provider in Europe that is trying to provide Cloud for our Enterprise customers. We have banks and large financial firms that are "very excited" about the project, which basically means that they understood the buzzwords.

Cloud in the Corp. world normally means VMWare vCloud (which we are now offering) or just VMWare ESX hosted in a remote datacenter.

So "the cloud" does exist in the Corp. world, its just that they are on average 5 years behind the rest of the tech world. I also think that a lot of these companies need to be 5 years behind, as their decision process on anything except cost savings normally takes months to complete with feature creep etc.

Re: Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software

#85

Post by davidgerard »

outside1234 wrote: post #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.

We're moving from Oracle to Postgres. From three huge Oracle instances to, pretty much, a cloud of Postgres boxes, a pair per application. Because we can.

Oracle is a superlative database, but it's the polar opposite of agile. This turns out to be important.

Re: Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software

#86

Post by parasubvert »

smtddr wrote: post #35
chatmasta wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 peop…

I have worked in enough enterprises that the above is both true and false. True in the pathological cases, false among some surprising leaders. I have seen people get fired for choosing Oracle and IBM, massive investments by enterprises into Amazon cloud (they're $6b and rising), adoption of (actual) agile processes and cloud platforms.

PCI compliance is a solved problem, whether it can be used as a cloud cudgel says more about the state of knowledge and power at a place than reality.

The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.

Re: Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software

#87

Post by parasubvert »

Spooky23 wrote: post #29
CyberDildonics wrote: post #4

I don't even know how Oracle is still the juggernaut that they are. A $10,000 dollar computer running postgres can serve a ridiculous amount of queries. I suspect the general idea is to spend huge amount of money to run incredibly inefficient SQL queries.

They sell solutions to business problems at the CEO/COO/CFO level. The database as outrageous as it is, is just a sideshow. I think New York spent something like $40M for a general ledger system. There is ridiculous amounts of money in these projects.

$40m is quite affordable. I've seen not super complicated SAP implementations of GL and FICA hit $100m+... Let's not forget telecom billing systems where Amdocs easily charges $200m and up in customization.

What is this money spent on? Well, if you consider knowledge a scarce resource.... Capital is a poor substitute but all you've got when you're clueless.

Re: Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software

#88

Post by pierre »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #4

I don't even know how Oracle is still the juggernaut that they are. A $10,000 dollar computer running postgres can serve a ridiculous amount of queries. I suspect the general idea is to spend huge amount of money to run incredibly inefficient SQL queries.

For what I see in the entreprise world they play it like that :

1. lock entreprise in a 5 year contract. 2. when contract is about to expire lower prices to match wathever other companies are offering for the next 5 years + migration cost. 3. Win the deal as you offer the best value for the money : same ammount + no risk. 4. repeat

This is the main reason why you can see companies running on mainframe in 2015.

Re: Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software

#89

Post by [deleted] »

travjones wrote: post #62
rdtsc wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simple -- the crowd who picks and buys Oracle doesn't hang out on HN. So if you are on HN then you think everyone runs Docker, Kubernetes, RethinkDB, Go, and something...something Reactive.

This is spot on. "Enterprise" dev life is way different than HN dev life.

[deleted]

Re: Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software

#90

Post by calgoo »

r00fus wrote: post #2

Article fails to identify if the sales figures are limited to database or whether they include the enterprise apps (i.e., EBS/Fusion). Regardless - the quote "Does the cloud-related business grow quickly enough to offset any long-term weakness in new software licenses? To us the answer is yes" seems to indicate that this is all sales for ORCL. Oracle relying on cloud is pitting them against some more entrenched cloud…

I think SAP is stealing a lot of Oracles non-db business ATM. From the last few years, all i hear is SAP hosting, SAP consultants, etc. Oracle has taken a backseat, with the only new Oracle software I have seen being their crappy hosted services.

The mayor problem with using open source in the Corp. world, is that many companies put rules such as:

"Any new technology product MUST have a multi million dollar company with 24/7 support available."

It never made any difference that it would be cheaper to hire two or three techs to do the job, as they come from different budgets (CAPEX vs OPEX).

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