Analyse this! Gartner puts data warehouse leaders on the couch

Oracle has been sued by Plexada System Integrators in Nigeria for alleged breach of contract and failure to pay millions of dollars said to be owed for assisting with a Lagos State Government IT contract.

Plexada is seeking almost $56 million in denied revenue, damages, and legal costs for work that occurred from 2015 through 2020.

A partner at Plexada, filed a statement with the Lagos State High Court describing the dispute. The document, provided to The Register, accuses Oracle of retaliating against Plexada and trying to ruin the firm's business for seeking to be paid.

Oracle and systems integrator Evosys have won contracts to implement a new Oracle Fusion ERP system for the London Borough of Waltham Forest as part of a project which expects £12 million capex over three years.

The consultancy firm has been awarded a contract worth £2 million ($2.45 million) as the implementation partner on the project, in a deal set to last nearly two years. It is unclear how much of the £12 million ($14.72 million) earmarked for the project in financial years 2021-22, 2022-23, and 2023-24 would contribute to Oracle licenses.

In its Outline Business Case [PDF] for the project, the council said Big Red's cloud-based system will replace an ageing SAP product first implemented in 2003.

Oracle has slimmed down its on-prem fully managed cloud offer to a smaller datacenter footprint for a sixth of the budget.

Snappily dubbed OCI Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer, the service was launched in 2020 and promised to run a private cloud inside a customer's datacenter, or one run by a third party. Paid for "as-a-service," the concept promised customers the flexibility of moving workloads seamlessly between the on-prem system and Oracle's public cloud for a $6 million annual fee and a minimum commitment of three years.

Big Red has now slashed the fee for a scaled-down version of its on-prem cloud to $1 million a year for a minimum period of four years.

Swansea City Council has been forced to extend an IT service provider contract to keep its unsupported and unpatched ERP system up and running because its replacement is running two years behind.

A procurement document published last week shows Infosys was awarded £2 million contract (c $2.40 million) extension, until 30 November 2023, to support the Welsh council's Oracle eBusiness Suite ERP system while it waits for the replacement Oracle Fusion system to be ready. It takes Infosys's total for supporting the old system to £6.7 million (c $8.1 million).

Council documents reveal the authority runs its finance and HR systems on EBS R12.1, which moved into Oracle Sustaining Support in January 2022 and will therefore no longer receive new fixes, updates, or security patches.

Oracle has impressed the markets with strong revenue growth for cloud infrastructure and applications-as-a-service.

However, Oracle is still struggling to gain a larger share of the global cloud market, where it lags behind AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.

Big Red's total revenue for Q4, which ended May 31, hit $11.8 billion, up 5 per cent on the same period a year ago. Total cloud revenue, including infrastructure and software-as-a-service, reached $2.9 billion, up 19 percent. Cloud ERP Fusion revenue increased 20 percent while NetSuite ERP cloud revenue grew 27 per cent.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise must pay Oracle $30 million for copyright infringement after a jury found it guilty of providing customers with Solaris software updates without Big Red's permission.

The decision, which HPE may contest, is the culmination of a three-week trial in Oakland, California. However, the case was first raised years back when Oracle claimed HPE had offered illegal updates under a scheme devised by software support provider Terix, which settled its case in 2015 for almost $58 million.

In proceedings at the start of this week, Oracle’s lawyer, Christopher Yeates of Latham & Watkins LLP, pressed the eight-person jury to award his client $72 million for HPE using software not covered by a support contract, and for pinching clients, including Comcast.

Oracle has closed the acquisition of Cerner Corporation, a specialist in healthcare software, in a deal set to be worth $28.3 billion.

But as Larry Ellison, Oracle's chairman of the board and chief technology officer, is set to outline Oracle's strategy for its acquisition's role in healthcare in the coming days, Cerner customers are being warned to expect some surprises in renegotiating their contracts.

Last month, Cerner said it secured 331 new, expanded and extended client contracts in first quarter, including Ohio-based Blanchard Valley Health System and Virginia-based Mountain Health Network.

Oracle is planning to build a national database of individuals' health records for the whole United States following its $28.3 billion acquisition of electronic health records specialist Cerner.

In a presentation, CTO and founder Larry Ellison said electronic health records for individual patients were stored by hospitals and physicians, and not replicated or shared between providers.

"We're going to solve this problem by putting a unified national health records database on top of all of these thousands of separate hospital databases," Ellison said.

The UK Home Office has awarded Oracle a £31.47 million ($39.5 million) contract to continue to run its HR and finance systems in the cloud.

The four-year software-as-a-service deal for Oracle's Fusion ERP system has been renewed to run from May 2022 to May 2026.

According to a tender notice, the award will provide "SaaS, Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service products for Metis," the internal name for the HR and finance system of the government department responsible for policing and border security.

MySQL pioneer Peter Zaitsev, an early employee of MySQL AB under the original open source database author Michael "Monty" Widenius, once found it easy to identify the enemy.

"In the early days of MySQL AB, we were there to get Oracle's ass. Our CEO Mårten Mickos was always telling us how we were going to get out there and replace all those Oracle database installations," Zaitsev told The Register.

Speaking at Percona Live, the open source database event hosted by the services company Zaitsev founded in 2006 and runs as chief exec, he said that situation had changed since Oracle ended up owning MySQL in 2010. This was as a consequence of its acquisition that year of Sun Microsystems, which had bought MySQL AB just two years earlier.