Sign in / up

back to article It's CLOUD WAR says Larry Ellison: parachute in the sales team

Larry Ellison has promised to bring holy price down upon the heads of cloud computing infidels. Microsoft, Amazon, Rackspace and Salesforce are all on notice: Ellison’s database giant will take them on, in infrastructure, platform and on apps. Ellison told Wall St on Wednesday he will be “price competitive” with Amazon’s AWS …

COMMENTS

House rules Send corrections
This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Oracle will never, ever be competitive in that segment

    I've said it many times before: dinosaurs won't innovate in areas that deteriorate their current revenue streams. Uptake -and big cost savings- on cloud is based among other things on moving to open source platforms and killing the expensive in house annual license maintenance slavery.

    Oracle has spent the last decade or so trying at the same time both to widen their customer lock in (acquisitions) and to break its dependence on the maintenance revenue streams.

    Which are basically mutually exclusive targets, so it is not surprising how little luck they have had so far. Maybe they have to realize that there is no other market segment where they can have such huge profit margins.

    Feel bad for those stock analysts believing these fairy tales....

    4 1
    1. knarf
      Reply Icon

      Re: Oracle will never, ever be competitive in that segment

      They can if they really really want to. They have the cash to burn and a unique mix of systems, databases and hardware. If they don't then they the next Borland/Lotus/etc... and they know this. They need a complete mind set change, will be interesting, but I think they will fail.

      4 0
  2. nematoad

    Oh?

    "Ellison told Wall St on Wednesday he will be “price competitive” with Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft’s Windows Azure and Rackspace".

    Expect the others to put the prices up then.

    Ellisons having a laugh with this. He wouldn't know how to cut prices if his life depended on it.

    Good old Oracle, never knowingly oversold. (Apologies to John Lewis.)

    5 0
  3. Zacherynuk

    For some reason this reminds me of every time I see a billboard on a new development in London: "Coming soon: exclusive 1 and 2 bedroom luxury apartments".

    Dunno why.

    1 0
  4. Trevor_Pott Gold badge

    Oracle sale pitch

    "We won't lock you in (and turn the knobs on you every time revenue takes a dip) this time! Honest! Love us? We were such good friends before!"

    7 0
  5. bigtimehustler

    Yes, they will lower your infrastructure costs, but probably only if your willing to also sign up to software licences which cost a fortune and offer the same features as free software. The only way you will get the bargaining power at infrastructure level will be with the software deals. Why bother when others already offer a decent price, i mean i don;t see Oracle beating AWS at the features or performance levels so what exactly will Oracle bring to the table to offset the animosity felt towards them and their high software prices?

    3 0
  6. Matt Bryant Silver badge
    Facepalm

    Reduced scope for subsidisation.

    Everyone knows Larry has subsidised his hardware biz by taking cash from the licence and support businesses, and it still hasn't bought him the $2bn-per-year hardware biz he claimed it would. Now he's going to subsidise a cloud biz as well? Yeah, that would work, only his licence revs are down again, which means Larry has had to make more money by screwing us customers over for more expensive support again. For Larry to keep the whole house of cards standing, he needs to keep the licence revenue increasing, otherwise Wall Street will look to invest elsewhere and us customers will look for cheaper software options.

    1 1
  7. RainForestGuppy

    Unfortunetly.....

    .... in this case the competion is too big for Ellison to buy, rape for all their decent technology and then close down, forcing customers to migrate to a more expensive and worse Oracle solution.

    4 1
  8. Hit Snooze
    Stop

    Sales pitch

    "Amazon is the market share leader by volume of data held in cloud; Salesforce a mind-share leader."

    Mind-share leader, really? I would think that the big three, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft each have more mind-share than Salesforce. I bet even Rackspace has more mind-share

    3 0
    1. Matt Bryant Silver badge
      Reply Icon
      Pirate

      Re: Hit Snooze Re: Sales pitch

      Ah, but Larry usually disses a company and then buys it.....

      0 0
  9. itscoldhere

    This, from the company that still struggles to get single-sign on right in its abysmal, hideous customer web sites, and takes a month to issue a (paper) receipt for a OPN subscription.

    Unless you're a 'nobody ever got fired for buying IBM' government/big corporation IT dinosaur, there's not much reason to cough up huge amounts of money on an annual basis for what is basically a commodity these days -- safe and secure of transactional data.

    If I want cloud services, I'll go to a supplier that is (a) actually, demonstrably good at it (b) will minimize lock-in (c) hasn't turned an entire generation of techies against it with their rapacious sales policies, crap service, and overpriced legacy products. In other words, even with their warts, the competition have one big thing going for them -- they're not Oracle.

    7 0
  10. Ian Moyse
    WTF?

    So Oracle thinks by having cloud it can just own cloud. It has the reputation of an Enterprise solution and one that as others have stated has locked in customers to its platforms and milks the renewals and upgrades/maintenance, areas that you cannot do in Cloud where this is inherently included.

    In the Small to Mid market firms which represents a good 95% + of all businesses by volume Oracle is not a prime choice vendor and this is the area where cloud has the most benefit and reach for new opportunities.

    Interesting also that it slates Salesforce as a target when it only recently announced Salesforce as a partner for its underlying database technologies.

    Ian Moyse

    Workbooks

    3 0
  11. K7AAY

    Oregon proves the quality of Oracle

    http://www.oregonlive.com/health/index.ssf/2013/12/oregon_health_exchange_technol.html shows how teriffic a job Oracle does for its clients. How could anyone trust them now?

    1 0
This topic is closed for new posts.

Other stories you might like