back to article Internal power struggle at Oracle leaves Brits cool on Sun

Oracle's sales force are riding roughshod over channel partners with the total available market for distribution in Blighty shrinking by more than a half in the last year, according to insiders. This comes in the wake of Judson Altoff's departure from Oracle in March. The global partner boss was a 14-year veteran of the firm …

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  1. Joe Montana
    FAIL

    What do you expect?

    Being a reseller is always a dangerous short term game... Your a middleman, and an unnecessary one at that, sooner or later the vendor and/or end client will realise that they can cut you out of the picture and keep your share for themselves.

    1. knarf
      Facepalm

      Re: What do you expect?

      I've found deals with VARS much better than dealing directly with a huge monster than nether cares nor helps you if you back is against the wall (i.e. I need such and such a sevrer on loan for free for 2 days in two hours while we do a migration).

    2. Matt Bryant Silver badge
      Boffin

      Re: What do you expect?

      ".....Your a middleman, and an unnecessary one at that....." Well, yes and no. We buy through VARs rather than direct becasue the VARs we work with are multi-vendor, so we don't just get one marketing message. Whilst that doesn't always keep them honest (they are still most likely to push the product with the largest margin), it does make them less likely to push something regardless simply because it is the only option they have to offer. The other advantage is, if they have experience of more than one vendor's products, they may actually have more insight into integrating them together than just one vendor would. And some vendors (such as Oracle, in my experience) simply don't have the staff and scope to be able to advise on anything other than their own products, so a VAR is often another way to plug the gap.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Bigger problems here

    Really, the VAR-versus-direct problems is not the biggest one for Oracle, it is their customers voting with their wallets and moving away from them due to ever more expensive support that is also quite crap.

    We though Sun's support was pretty crap, but Oracle have managed to make that look quite good. It seems the whole point of their support is not to actually do anything useful, like debug a product, but simply to pass you from middle manager to middle manager until either the product you are using, or you, are retired through old age.

    Also the dropping of x86 and so on really did not help, the message being "we only care about the big boys toys".

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