back to article Oracle hires cloud 'success' pushers, denies EMEA customers are floating away

Oracle is expanding its platform-as-a-service cloud team in Europe, but denied it is a move to revive renewals. The database giant confirmed it is hiring 150 people across EMEA to join the firm’s Customer "Success" programme under Carmen Romero. Oracle told The Register the move is in response to growing customer demand and …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Cloud subs

    "... the wisdom of cloud subscriptions is that once customers are signed up, they are there for life."

    a) That's not really wisdom, more like clueless sales optimism.

    b) From the customer perspective, surely you'd take your data and jump to somewhere cheaper/faster/better?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Cloud subs

      Well yeah, I the danger of SaaS/cloud is that the customer is pretty much free to fuck off whenever they feel like it, and the advantage of on-premise software/hardware was it was stickier - ie. more of an investment in the first place, so you're less likely to ditch it on a whim.

      It's for this reason I find the idea of Oracle and the cloud hilarious - the software looks good on paper, but it's once you start implementing and using it you immediately start regretting it.

      Anonymous because I'm a disgruntled former Oracle employee, who now works for a proper SaaS company with 95% renewal rates :)

    2. Steve K

      Re: Cloud subs

      > b) From the customer perspective, surely you'd take your data and jump to somewhere cheaper/faster/better?

      Possibly, but that depends whether you are just hosting a database, or something built on Oracle Apps too (e.g. EBusiness Suite) where a move is definitely non-trivial and carries significant business risk.

  2. Cederic Silver badge

    This is the inevitable consequence of the bonus-chasing tactics Oracle sales teams have followed since their incentive plan switched to massively focus on Cloud sales.

    "Hi Oracle, could I get a quote for.." on anything on-premise resulted in a response that largely can be summarized as "$$$$$, or you can have it for $ if you also take cloud service X"

    As a customer it's a no-brainer: Grab the stupidly massive discount on the product you want, agree to buy and use Service X, and choose not to renew a year in.

    It'll be nice if Oracle can start treating their customers as people they'd like to do business with, not a source of sales bonuses.

  3. TechYogJosh

    Oracle has no cloud, it says it has

    Oracle never gave a "true cloud", much like dedicated SaaS hosting (whatever it means). There is no competitor of SFDC or Workday that it has. Still trying to arrest clients in its own "hosted cloud" version with no multi-tenancy, managing multiple instances, customizing etc. Basically doing the same on-premise stuff but now on Oracle's data centers. But it will realize clients can be fooled for some more time, not beyond that. They may not want a public multi-tenant cloud, but dedicated hosted version is like a stupidity. Given the cash and deep pocket, Oracle may continue with its financial re-engineering and call it "cloud", let's say for how long.

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