Live data from Hacker News

Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software

bloomberg.com

111–120 of 143 posts

Re: Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software

#111
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Who is going to sign a Service Level Agreement for your postgres install? Support contracts are super important for enterprise.

EnterpriseDB? http://www.enterprisedb.com/ba/license-support-services-v3-0

That's a good first step, but that's not enough for many companies.

If you're an enterprise customer with IBM, Oracle, or Microsoft, you know that you can have someone onsite within 24 hours if you have a critical failure, sometimes even sooner. You know that you can have people engaged 24/7 for as long as it takes to get you back up and running and you'll have not just technical people, but also incident managers who will keep you updated and help the engineers locate additional resources. They'll have someone sit in a conference bridge around the clock if you want, ready to provide updates.

Enterprises are also thinking about long time spans. With IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Redhat, and others, they generally guarantee at least 10 years of support for their products, plus the ability for custom agreements that go beyond their normal support dates. Offering 3+2 is a good start, but that's not long enough. Remember, many (probably most) banks still have applications written in COBOL running.

Don't get me wrong, I think everyone should look at all the available options - free and paid. At the end of the day, though, there are a lot of projects where the risks and expected application lifecycle pretty much mandate the level of support you only get from the big companies.

Re: Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software

#112

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 do what they always have done - they buy companies that are behind their prime time and then provide legacy support for their systems. That is their bread and butter. If sales go down? Buy some more faded companies and watch sales improve again.

Queries per second is simply not a relevant question.

Re: Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software

#113

Oracle never really cared about the developer experience. Eventually that wears out whatever market lead a company might have. Oracle can be very fast and well setup but the tools to work with are not good and the general optimization now is not as needed with cheaper hardware and more horizontal systems. There are so many other options out there now. PostgreSQL is great to work with and is so good now that it just m…

Postgres is great, but sadly it's not really in contention for being the RDBMS leader right now: http://db-engines.com/en/ranking/relational+dbms, but it is steadily climbing.

Re: Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software

#114
Oracle Sales are far from eroding, and the opposite is true. Very misleading article and analysis, and questioning which vendor is in writers pocket? "Figures don't lie but liars do figure"

According to the leading analysts, Oracle has grown software revenues by over ~2.5% in 2014 vs 2013 and Oracle has grown Database revenue as well having a world wide DBMS share above 40% with growth of over 4% in 2014. If you look at who's got the most popular database(s) in the world, by ranking, Oracle Database is ranked #1 and Oracle MySQL is ranked #2. http://db-engines.com/en/ranking

While the article infers fewer licenses sold means Oracle is eroding, article doesn’t mention that Oracle is showing growth in software upgrades, DBAAS, and overall, growth in cloud- private, hybrid and public. The “c” in “Oracle DB 12c” stands for “cloud”. Oracle has over 400,000 customers, where over 310,000 are Database customers according to the Oracle Fact sheet http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/oracle-fact-sheet-079219....

You say Oracle Database is expensive-compared to what? Its all about what level of business value you require? Oracle sells several editions of Oracle DB from Oracle Database Personal Edition that starts at $92 per named user license to Oracle Database Standard Edition One with License costing as little as US$180.00 to the Oracle Database Standard Edition version starting at $350 per User license. Not everyone requires the enterprise features of Oracle Database Enterprise Edition. https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/product?p1=Database&p2=Or...

Theres no such thing as free software unless you consider peoples time free, from administration, patching, management, support, upgrading, etc. You can surely download any open source Database but no ones going to support it for free. If you’re an enterprise, you're surely seeing your OPEX budgets sky-rocket, and a lot of that is due to "free" software and commodity hardware and the integration and management of a very complex, multi-vendor stack requiring armies of people to get it and keep it running.

Re: Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software

#115
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EnterpriseDB? http://www.enterprisedb.com/ba/license-support-services-v3-0

The drive time from the nearest EnterpriseDB office to my office is at least 12 hours (and that is probably quite a bit below the median). To the nearest Oracle office it's a 15 minute walk. That is probably going to have some effect on the call out time for technicians.

But then Oracle doesn't do support directly, it is one of their partners. So maybe you should look for some EnterpriseDB partner ;)

Re: Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software

#116
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

5. threaten a compliancy audit unless they re-sign.

5a. fine, go for it. However, any cost for compliance audit we will add to your solutions' TCO, when comparing competitive offers.

Re: Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software

#117
post #11

Earlier 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…

> 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.

"Safety" is also having someone to blame when things go bad. That's the hardware/software vendor or the integrator doing the implementation. Where do you think the "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" saying came from?

Re: Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software

#118

In China, there is a hot trend called de-IOE (to remove IBM,Oracle and EMC or other big foreign IT companies' technologies and products from IT systems) in enterprise IT. Instead, we use open sources, or cloud/ X as a Service, or local technologies. I wonder if it is the same in USA or other countries?

at the same time they block github.

The government is blocking github, not those tech companies..

Re: Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software

#119
post #41

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.

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.

We do hang around here, but technologies are adopted on "business value" not "geek factor".
Post reply on HN