back to article Oracle to sue cloud sales 'whistleblower' for 'malicious prosecution'

Oracle isn't known as a shrinking violet when it comes to legal battles, and it's coming out swinging over allegations that it was playing fast and loose with its cloud revenue reporting. On Wednesday, Svetlana Blackburn filed a lawsuit with the US district court in San Francisco claiming that she was fired from the company …

  1. LordHighFixer

    They broke the sun

    So their stock dropped $6bn. They blacked out the Sun, so fsck them.

    1. Fatman
      Joke

      Re: They broke the sun

      <quote>They blacked out the Sun, so fsck them.</quote>

      I see that you did there!!!!!

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    umm

    If she's right, this is not going to go well. Don't they know they will now have to open their accounting practices up to intense scrutiny? " How dare her !! We'll sue the bitch right back... See. We take these numbers from here and put them over there and ...oh,.. Never mind"

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: umm

      That is generally known as Creative Accounting.

      Wasn't there another rather large US/International organisation hauled over the coals for doing just that, Enron maybe, and look where that got them.

      1. Richard Jones 1
        Happy

        Re: umm

        I wonder, does hope spring eternal?

        I wonder how they usually wash their used smalls?

  3. hellwig

    Classic tactic

    Deny, Discredit, and Destroy. Whether or not this person is telling the truth, don't take Oracle's word for it either way.

    1. Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

      Re: Classic tactic

      And more bluntly: intimidate.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Classic tactic

        To be fair I think most cloud providers are doing it..... talk up the product, tell the market everyone's switching to it, throw in some "big name" companies who are "doing it" (even if they've barely dipped their toes in the water) etc. etc.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Classic tactic

      There are many truths...

      Oracle are so keen to be seen to be a big cloud player that they are restricting much of their software to cloud only and stopping the development of on-premise versions. So to be include in their cloud revenue what percentage of the software has to utilise the cloud?

      Does it have to be fully hosted with just a browser connection?

      Can it be on-premise but with the management or BI interface existing in the cloud?

      Can it be totally on-premise but it just happens to back up to Oracles cloud?

      Does it just need to check for a licence key held on a server in Oracle's Data Centre, once in a while?

      1. Bob Dole (tm)

        Re: Classic tactic

        >There are many truths...

        As usual, it will depend on who the report was generated for.

  4. ecofeco Silver badge

    As I've said before

    Business as usual.

    1. asdf

      Re: As I've said before

      Yep 35% yearly price increases all around.

  5. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

    Yeah, right, shoot the messenger.

  6. Mpeler
    Paris Hilton

    Hell hath no fury...

    Sounds like another one of Larry's ex-girlfriends is cheesed off at him...

    Not Svetlana, but Paris will have to do.

    Lady in Red...hat (RHEL is your hell?)...

  7. Adam 52 Silver badge

    The articles doesn't make sense. To claim malicious prosecution the original case needs to have been dismissed - not just filed or to have gone to trial.

    Since she only filed on Wednesday there's no time for that to have happened so no possibility of a malicious prosecution tort.

    1. asdf

      Thus the difference between PR actions and legal actions.

    2. diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Re: Adam 52

      Makes perfect sense. Oracle is so convinced it's going to win, it's already threatening a malicious prosecution suit.

      C.

  8. WraithCadmus
    Thumb Down

    Oracle Delenda Est

    The post is required, and must contain letters.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Inflated cloud claims

    It doesn't need the accountants to inflate cloud usage claims; we recently did business with a third-party provider whose service has a back-end provided by a certain well-known cloud provider which may (or may not) start with A.

    Imagine our surprise when the cloud provider started claiming our organisation as a client! A little investigating was done and it seems that there was a clause in the third-party's agreement with the cloud provider that allowed them to publicise any company or organisation using the service who they could identify, ostensibly from the third-party's naming conventions (and/or possibly the data itself; which is quite worrying).

    As the third-party had failed to mention this in negotiation they were kicked into touch PDQ, and the cloud provider notified that we were no longer using the service so they had better remove us from their list of clients immediately or publicity would ensue...

  10. JaitcH
    Happy

    Once Oracle always an Oracle staff

    QUOTE: "Your humble hack here has a family member who was employed at Oracle for many years and he says that after the firm's HR department makes you jump through so many hoops to join, getting fired is very tricky indeed."

    A niece of mine works for Oracle UK ... has a pretty good position, too.

    She immigrated and rather than let her resign Oracle established her as an 'outside branch', using the InterNet and VPNs, where she has now been for going on 10 years with annual flights back home once a year to check in with her boss.

    Larry Ellison might be a rear end but Oracle is way better than him.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Maybe their concern is copyright violation. After all, it appears their accountants traditionally have just copied numbers from one spreadsheet into another before working with them, completely disregarding the hard work that went into the creation of those numbers. A good accountant creates new figures which aren't shamelessly derived from someone else's work.

    1. Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

      Deserves more upvotes.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    As an ex-Oracle employee, I can atest that Lazza n Saffs n Marky all rest heavily on the numbers. Which are imho solid. Creative accounting aside

    When is the Cloud not a Cloud? When Larry wants it to be. you can feel sure that they will front Big Legal Brains and tie it all down into Cloud definition semantics .

    "Cloud the new WAN? Off promise the new Bureau computing?"

    "Waddyaknow, we DO have big Cloud revenues after all." Sue. Sue!

    Ellison loves a big fight. But you cant win them all. Could this be The One that'll take him down?

    Love to see that Charlatan Hurd take the fall. Fat chance...

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