'Oracle, why are your sales f-' CLOUD CLOUD CLOUD, blasts Larry Investors had their knives out for Oracle once again on Wednesday after the database giant's fourth-quarter results missed analysts' estimates on both earnings and revenue. The report capped off a disappointing year for Oracle, one in which its total revenue for the twelve months was flat from the previous year, at $38.23bn. …
Looks llike would-be database buyers are getting the message that "other databases are available".
The maturity of open source databases, like MariaDB, and competitive pricing of products like MS SQL Server mean that those in the market for a DB have a lot of non-Oracle choices.
And maybe their customers and channel parters are getting pissed off with them too, and migrating away; as an employee of a one-time Oracle "partner" all I can say is you need a lot of lube for the treatment you get from them.
This article put a big smile on my face and that highlights Oracles problems. Customers hate them!! Nobody is too big to fail as has been shown many times over the years. Look at what's happened (happening) to IBM who abused a position of almost total domination for years. Oracle are following a well trodden path for those too big for their boots.
I'd really like to think of Larry Ellison, Mark Hurd and others in cardboard boxes at the end of the street. Unfortunately, it won't happen, but the idea of tossing them a copper or two whilst they sell the Big Issue with their dogs always brings a smile to my face.
.. is not healthy. FFS the company is still making a boatload of profit. So what if it didn't grow. Start worrying when it makes a loss. But oh dear, some hedge funds who bought a ton of shares and hoped to make a killing as they rose .... didn't. Well boo fuckin hoo.
And who the hell are these "analysts" anyway? A bunch of back room cretins who weren't good enough to get a job actually making money so they criticise those who do.
Exactly - I speak as an Oracle hater (you want HOW MUCH more for your licences and support this year?), but they are still making a lot of money
Yes, cloud is eating into some of their sales (and will continue to), but almost US$11b/year gives you a few ways to address that when your margins are sohealthy.
Agree in part but...
Look at all the "constant currency" stuff. In real term, they are making less and less profit every time, and their money that they are holding onto is worth less and less.
Growth needs to match inflation at the very least or you're actually shrinking, not staying still.
Think how that translates to someone who paid, say £1 per share last year. If their shares aren't worth MORE now, they have actually just lost money. And given that banks are holding near-zero interest rates, business investment is one of the few ways to make money again.
And, unfortunately, shareholders are why the business operates, not customers. Businesses exist for the benefit of their shareholders, there are even certain legal wordings and definitions of things like "company" that enshrine that in stone.
As such, the "constant currency" growth is actually a loss, behind weasel words. Shareholders are losing money, which means they'll sell the stock off cheap if things don't improve soon. This will make the company shares worth even less.
Given what they've done to just about every major project they've ever purchased (Java, MySQL, OpenOffice, etc.), I can only wish this to continue and accelerate. But it's still serious and not just a case of "We've got so much money we can just sit around doing nothing for a while".
One of the few positive things for Oracle in that article is the comment by Netsuite's CEO that their Oracle licence costs 6% of revenue, which is "nothing". On 2014 full year revenue of $556.3m, I make that $33m a year. Netsuite's net loss for the year was $100m.
Certainly switching to an open source database wouldn't take $33m out of the loss, but it should make a dent in it. Also, if their attitude to other costs is "it's only x%, that's nothing", maybe the years of losses aren't that surprising.
Larry Ellison, family and "related entities" own 47% of Netsuite stock, according to the latest 10-Q.
Well; this is what happens when you treat your customers like they do.
Having endured the 'oracle licence shakedown' (including the well documented 'oracles cloud cuckoo definition of virtualisation' - now THAT is fun! ) my only real 'vow' as an IT professional is that I will never through choice procure from Oracle. Legacy I accept [for now] but no-one should be able to behave to their customers like Oracle does - and that will shape IT strategies.
Vote with your feet/wallets people. Larry doesnt need another island...
Probably going to make me unpopular but...
Oracle has their definition of virtualization that has not changed in 10 years. You may disagree with it, but it is clearly spelled out in black and white that you can't just bung this stuff on a VMware farm without licensing all the processors. The fact that you chose to ignore that and got busted for it is a situation entirely of your own making. If you don't like the policy don't buy the software or don't install it on VMware - problem solved.
Anon because former Oracle employee and current Oracle partner.
Yep. This is where they've fallen and won't budge. Because they bought out Sun and developed Unbreakable Linux, they came up with the daft idea that they could force the customer to buy their whole stack. This might work with the very largest of customers, but in today's more dynamic world it doesn't work with the vast majority of customers.
Existing small to medium-sized businesses will use VMWare and want to partition the server resources without using Oracle's hard partitioning and so they all move away.
Even larger organisations are experimenting with virtualisation servers on demand and this goes against Oracle Everything and so Mr Alpha Male's approach has seen 2 fingers from the vast majority of companies.
Most of criticism is based on Oracle price and license.
Yes its expensive. Find an alternative if it meets your demands. And customers are. The ones that need serious RDBMS stick to Oracle.
License. Done this multiple times. If you are through and know how to leverage it, it can be judiciously done. Hence License firms exist.
Sales were down. True. But its not as if the roof fell.
Oracle is going Cloud. This transition will be very shaky and it must survive to be relevent.
All clouds companies run on DBs, OS, Servers. Infra that Oracle is in business of along with EMC, MS, IBM, HP etc.
the remaining folks just wanna bitch about Big firms. Hell every open Source company wants to be Oracle....ask Red Hat. They are not even making their own software.
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