
Oracle Corporation
On the basis of this, considering it is totally insignificant to them, I have to conclude Oracle is a miserable, ungrateful, petty organisation. Glad I don't work for them.
Oracle, which requires salespeople to agree to binding arbitration to avoid costly disputes in court, is unhappy that an arbitrator ruled against it. So it is suing one of its own employees, applications account manager Felicia Wilson, in a New York court to undo the arbitrator's $257,335.79 award. That's the amount Oracle …
I see this a lot in the US, companies set goals and when the sales people exceed them they cut the bonuses and/or divide the territory for get the bonuses back under control. In the US bonuses like this are designed to encourage the sales staff - the company gets very upset when they actually have to pay out and "adjusts" the "problem"
The corporate view is that bonuses paid to the sales people is money that should be going to the managements pockets.
I see this a lot in the US, companies set goals and when the sales people exceed
Moving the goalposts is a just another corporate pastime; it doesn't just happen with salespeople. If any goal is exceeded, it must have been too easy; conversely, if you don't reach said arbitrary goal, you're useless dead weight which must be trimmed.
From my perspective both Oracle and Wilson are greedy. I have seen so many times the sales person get all the reward (clearly not at Oracle), despite being strongly supported by a technical team who are simply salaried and get no recognition for their contribution to closing the deal.
Yes, I get that sales people are generally paid by commission; the issue is that the sale typically isn't all because of them.
From my perspective both Oracle and Wilson are greedy. I have seen so many times the sales person get all the reward (clearly not at Oracle), despite being strongly supported by a technical team who are simply salaried and get no recognition for their contribution to closing the deal.
Oh yes - I gave a company a flaming government monopoly and was just given a thank you. Not even a drink from the sales people who thanks to some design changes made twice the amount of money per connection they originally would have made.
That said, she's right. She has a contract, and did a good job selling so Oracle should not try to claim back what is in effect a good deal for them. If Oracle wins this one I'd suggest that their sales people really need to go and look for other work because you can't trust them.
"If Oracle wins this one I'd suggest that their sales people really need to go and look for other work because you can't trust them."
Yep. Once you've made quota and are effectively going to get next to nothing for any further sales, then it's in the best interests of the salesperson to either sit on their arse and do nothing for the rest of the year or to deliberately delay any in-progress negations until the next financial year.
What a shite way to run an incentive programme!
Yes, I get that sales people are generally paid by commission; the issue is that the sale typically isn't all because of them.
100% this. At a previous job we had a salesman for our product who went to one of our existing customers (note - not HIS existing customer, they were a customer before he joined) for a meeting. They said "hey, it'd be cool if you had a thing that could do xyz". And he said "No problem!" and drew up a large invoice which they agreed to.
Of course, we had no such thing. So it fell to me - several months of single-handed massive effort - to develop the entire solution (hardware and software), with the sole contribution of the salesman to be to send me weekly emails asking why it was taking so damn long. He didn't even come to any of the meetings I ended up having with the customer.
At the end of it, he got a 5-figure commission, and I got a nomination for employee of the month. I didn't win.
In most large organisations, if the salesperson learns of a large opportunity that is winnable, the organisation will form a team. This is not headed up by the salesperson (who will continue to own the relationship) but by an Enterprise Architect and possibly a senior 'Client Partner' (or some such title). The role of the sales person is /certainly/ NOT analagous to a military commander!
"Oracle, which requires salespeople to agree to binding arbitration to avoid costly disputes in court, is unhappy that an arbitrator ruled against it. So it is suing one of its own employees..."
So...it's binding unless the corporation that forced the arbitration doesn't like the result.
nice...
<sigh>
"I wonder if the Ms. Wilson would like to try to force this into open court rather than arbitration of the companies choosing."
I think the fact Oracle are challenging the binding arbitration result means they have broken that clause of the employment contract so she is free to challenge their challenge any way she sees fit.
No, it's like a license agreement. You agree you owe them everything and they agree they owe f*&k all. The abitrator didn't understand this basic tenant of Oracle law.
Upvoted, but I have to be that guy and point out that the word you're looking for is tenet, as in "basic tenet of Oracle law". Unless we're talking about a lodger ("lodger-ing an appeal"? ahaha), in which case "tenant" might be appropriate after all.
Nifty Tsk, wonder if I should leave this grubby software industry and run a nice clean brothel instead.
To paraphrase the old joke:
Teacher asks class of kindergartners to tell everyone what their mummy/daddy do at work.
Timmy stands up: "My daddy's a fireman!"
Alice stands up: "My mommy's a carpenter!"
Bobby stands up: "My daddy plays piano in a brothel!"
Teacher is outraged, and that very night storms round to Bobby's parents' house to confront them. Bobby's dad answers the front door, and tries to explain: "Well, really, I'm a salesman for Oracle. But honestly, how do you explain something like that to an innocent child??"
With drug dealers, they give you first hit for free. You get hooked and you either pay up for drugs or the dealer cuts you off and leaves you to die in your own vomit.
With software dealers, they give the first hit for free. You get hooked and you keep paying. If you stop paying, the dealers come after you, demand you keep paying, take you to court to force you to pay up one more time to close the last deal and finally leave you broke, with no access to your apps or data and finally watch you get dumped out on the street waiting to die of exposure!
Oracle doesn't want to pursue the case in open court. Rather it's asking to have the case re-arbitrated, with a different arbitrator.
So, what? They'll keep trying until they get an arbitrator who rules in their favour?
The attitude is nothing new,I had a similar but much smaller dispute with a copier company I worked for, struck luckyand found two clients with chains of offices, did the deal at a great price and the company took the whole thing off me, put on to National Accounts and refused to pay me anything.
It's surprising how much wear and tear a one year old company car can experience! and it wasn't mine it was the National sales director's.
And don't even *think* about running your Oracle instances on ESXi 6.x. Rather than charging by user, Oracle wants to charge you for ALL processors in your entire infrastructure, regardless of how many happen to be running Oracle at any given time. They claim it's bacause of instance portability, any given processor *could* be running an Oracle instance at any given time, so they have to charge for ALL of them.
That's nothing for Oracle. Plenty customers spend in excess $100m per year on Larrys code. It's a corollary of owning 50% of the planets database installations. Then trying to shovel all sorts of crap on top ( read: the rest of the oracle portfolio.
They are a thoroughly reprehensible bunch all in it for themselves. Capitalism? Yes, but without a shred of benign empathy. Hurd is a nasty character, well suited to Larry and that woman Safra.
Sales folk are greedy - they may need to be in a culture like oracles, where they are ritually pressurised, scrutinized, ridiculed in front of their peers, then spat out. It takes a certain sort of resilience in someone to want to be there.
I was. So you can sense my bias....ghastly organization.
This is what I've come to expect from Oracle...
They love to throw in the gotchas in small print, and when wrong they throw lawyers at the problem.
Reminds me of the ongoing JAVA fiasco...
There has to somewhere else this obviously talented sales person can go to.
Red Hat, maybe?
Eh, you'd be surprised. Bitter battles over commission are considered part and parcel of the job of account exec. Likewise for territory. As long as she keeps bringing in revenue this is but a sideshow. Frankly she'd struggle to make that much commission anywhere else; very few people still seal deals at Oracle's scale, breadth and depth; most of them don't pay Oracle commissions. Certain IBM products are still in the same league, but I wouldn't expect that to last very much longer.
With all that in the bank, she could afford to go somewhere with lower commissions, that's a very nice nest egg to fall back on, plus this couldn't have been an isolated year, article says she had to fight for commissions before...she probably has enough banked that, once this is added in, she could clear enough per year to make ends meet even without working...anything she got doing sales elsewhere would just be padding.
Its probably a lot of money to her and most other people, but to Orable it's just pocket change and that just kind of adds to her defense so yeah, they sure are petty, sir.
It's like if I was fighting to take my dollar bill back from a homeless guy when you knew I has $100 bill in my wallet. You would call me petty but that dollar may sure mean a lot more to him than you or I.
Even if they were allowed to keep every penny of those exact, actual dollars that they are fighting about right now, they may end up paying out more than that as time goes by. One way or another things will balance out and karma finds a way, even if it's simply slightly lower revenues because of the lower morale and less enthusiasm of a team of people who would otherwise have been empowered and motivated by seeing this lady earn a huge pile of dollars.
Management - look after your employees, they are way more important than you.
And this is going to motivate their sales staff - How? Were I a share holder I would be a tad f*cking furious at this totally incompetent management. Forget the emails - they are simply local conversations between idiots. The key question is, "why are these idiots in a position where they fail to reward excellent work"?
Still - it takes a long time for a firm to drift into institutionalised incompetence. Just ask Amiga, Atari, IBM (and where are they when you want to buy a PC Junior), Sun (no connection with Oracle there) and of course SCO.
Miss you Pamela.
I had an issue with an employer, when the hardware we were selling, became a bit too popular and they couldn't ramp up production fast enough. The end result was that the customers were happy to wait, but the company couldn't supply for nearly two months, resulting (eventually) in a month when all the products came into stock (from production) and went straight out again.
The effect of this was two months of very low commission, followed by one month of very, very high commission...and if you averaged it out, over the three months, the monthly commission figure was about the same as most previous months.
However, one of the top bosses took umbrage that a lowly sales rep was (for one month) paid more than him...so the following month the commission level (on this product) was permanently reduced.
Myself and the other reps, were not best pleased :-(
Wait a minute.
This sales person out performed her sales quota by a WIDE margin and instead of compensating her properly for making the company money, they screwed her out of her well earned compensation? ORACLE deserves to be crushed by ANY and ALL competitors in IT, whether it be Database, Unix, Cloud, or all of the above. Worthless pathetic nonsense. And Mark Hurd was involved? That explains it.
That's the way of a sales person - that Contract you sign at the start of each year is improved each year to assure the company pay you as little as possible and tightens the thumb screws everytime you sell something. Be thankful - because next year when you miss that target - doesn't matter how much they screwed you over this year - you are toast.
Really? Really REALLY?
I've no love for Oracle but have made a lot of money over the last 20 years implementing their core enterprise and ERP solutions (SAP also) as an independent contractor. There are better (and cheaper) industry scalable alternatives to almost every single product Oracle offer.
That is crazy good commission...but base was not mentioned- if it is a 100% commission compensation structure it slightly makes sense, but still crazy good.
This does sound like a real screwing of the rep. Dell also has a practice of "Capping" to earners...which is absolutely counterproductive, as any salesperson at that level is also good enough to know when to sandbag, slow roll, and otherwise time orders to work around these things usually...then switch rolls before you get the next years commission letter. Otherwise, if you get a big pay out, the company will hit you with "Success tax" until they get it back. Also, one you hit cap, most people will basically stop working rather than doing work for free that will pay commission in a few months.
Thank you el Reg for listing that quota and commission structure. Useful information for when I have to sign my next commission letter...
I am glad Ms. Wilson is standing up to Oracle! I am an Oracle employee who had a lot of money taken away because I made too much the previous year (according to Oracle). As a result and into the following year with large commission payments still pending, Oracle retroactively amended the terms and conditions of the previous year's compensation plan. They did this obviously so they wouldn't have to pay me for commissions that were pending (for the previous year). Further, last year's deals that were already paid out were deemed as "overages" so that "overage" amount was then deducted from the already-reduced pending commission amount equating to peanuts. Lastly, this had only occurred to me throughout the entire business unit and when confronted, there was no explanation was given. Let's just say I'm considering many options.
On another note, Oracle is an evil company. The only way they "innovate" (or lack thereof) is by gobbling up companies. The way they sell is by auditing companies and then settling by leveraging unfair business practices to force those customers in purchasing cloud in lieu of litigation. They do this to give the illusion to its shareholders that Oracle has a strong and growing cloud strategy/customer-base. From my experience, customers are moving away from Oracle and rightfully so.
In conclusion, Congrats Ms. Wilson! A job well-done!! Upon reading the motions, I know it's not over yet, but the Ts & Cs of the comp plan is certainly unconscionable in my opinion