back to article Lords of May-hem: Seven signs it is Oracle's year end

You might be able to tell what time of year it is by the blossom on the trees or bluebells in the woods. But for Oracle customers stuck in an office somewhere, there is another way of knowing that it's May without consulting a calendar. A frenzy of Oracle sales calls, account managers getting in touch with a deep concern about …

  1. Pascal Monett Silver badge
    Mushroom

    "there's nothing illegal in its approach"

    And there's nothing illegal in telling them to take a hike and not signing up in the first place.

    1. b0llchit Silver badge
      Big Brother

      Re: "there's nothing illegal in its approach"

      Hm, last time I checked, coercion was not legal.

      Oracle sells like this: Nice business you have there. Would be a shame if you got an audit and were forced to pay Mega$. However, if you buy this little product for only half a Mega$, then you are in the clear for another year.

    2. theblackhand

      Re: "there's nothing illegal in its approach"

      There's questionable legality about putting the first Oracle account managers head on a spike outside HQ, having spare spikes around it and a note saying there's more on back order.

      I say "questionable" because most publican's will provide an alibi if you're a regular and the police have got better things to do once they remember the annual squeeze on overtime to pay Oracles increased licence costs.

  2. perkele

    Oracle. The virus that once it takes hold is hard to get rid of.

    1. ITMA Silver badge
      Devil

      I thought that was Norton....

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Just like Open Text, where many of their ex-leaders went.

      Avoid both and short circuit the rush to the exits!

  3. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    "Yes, I'd like to talk to you but it'll have to be in a couple of month's time. I'm a bit tied up with this Postgress migration project at the moment."

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      As long as it's not EDB Postgres, whose pitch includes "We're not quite as nasty to deal with as Oracle, and not quite as wallet-emptyingly expensive"

  4. SnailFerrous

    Palisade Compliance, an Oracle licensing advisory company

    That such a company exists tells you all you need to know about Oracle.

    1. SVD_NL Silver badge

      Re: Palisade Compliance, an Oracle licensing advisory company

      My exact thoughts when I read that.

      Shame a lot of their profits probably go towards employee therapy costs, dealing with Oracle all day every day must take a toll on your mental health.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Palisade Compliance, an Oracle licensing advisory company

        Therapy costs get wrapped into their middling insurance coverage with United Healthcare. Leaving Oracle was the best thing I've ever done for my mental health.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Palisade Compliance, an Oracle licensing advisory company

      We didn't go with them, we went with another advisory company and they saved us a ton of money, every penny we paid them was worth it. As Big Red gets more desperate to put the screws on remaining customers I strongy advise everyone to find a legal advisory company, you finally get to sleep at night rather than worrying about the Oracle Gestapo banging down your company's door demanding to check on anything with an Oracle badge.

      1. SVD_NL Silver badge
        Megaphone

        Re: Palisade Compliance, an Oracle licensing advisory company

        Auditmachen! Schnell! Schnell!

  5. Jay 2
    Stop

    Ah, this all may explain why myself (a sys admin), the DBAs, the CTO and countless others all got an email a few weeks back from Oracle asking that as we're using Oracle DB on RHEL if we'd like to consider using Oracle Linux.

    Fortunately my colleagues and I could quite happily come up with tales of woe concerning Oracle, to ensure their approach went nowhere.

  6. JacobZ

    Year end insanity

    In all my 40 years in the enterprise software business, I never got my head around the insanity of robbing Q1 to pay Q4.

    But hey, everybody has to make their quota number *this* quarter, right?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Year end insanity

      "... the insanity of robbing Q1 to pay Q4."

      This is nothing more than short-termism at its greatest.

      Sales people have only one focus .... themselves & the next month-end commissions.

      As intimated in the article, Sales people can get moved about; so getting paid *now* is better than *more* later as you may be giving the monies to another Sales person.

      The only thing *more* important than month-end is year-end .... yearly targets met and bonuses earned.

      Golden rule is to negotiate just prior to month-ends or year-ends ....

      Be prepared to walk if you do not get what, next month/quarter you will possibly have a *new* Sales person who is just as eager to open with a good sale. !!!

      Beware of tricks like booking sales *this* month/quarter for delivery next month/quarter etc

      This usually gets caught eventually and the numbers can change as a consequence .... sometimes with the Sales person discovering they have an *opportunity* to work for someone else as of *now* !!!

      :)

    2. doublerot13

      Re: Year end insanity

      The only difference between a tech salesperson and someone selling houses, or used cars on a lot, is at some point in the past a butterfly on the other side of the world happened to flap its wings at the right time. I work with them... I'm mates with a few.... but they're simpletons. And the joke is they think they are "business" experts.

      Thing is though.... it's not their fault. It's the idiot employers thinking this sh*t works, and setting "targets" that the whole sales org instantly works out a way to game. If anyone - including us techs - are rewarded for behaving in a certain way, we do it.

      1. Gmanton

        Re: Year end insanity

        Can I just say that first line of yours made my day.

    3. Tim 11

      Re: Year end insanity

      In my company we used to get big customers and prospects call us at end-of-year to proactively look for discounted deals. Our response - "actually our numbers for this year are a bit ahead of where we'd like them so if it's OK with you we'd rather slip this deal back a couple of weeks so it goes into the next financial year".

  7. Bebu
    Devil

    Demonology?

    The dot points are like exercises in the defenses against the dark arts.

    Not that I am saying Larry resembles the light bearing chap who took a tumble from the heavenly host dropping the lamp.

    Still the business practices of Oracle could probably augment the training manuals of the diabolic agents of the infernal regions.

    1. veti Silver badge

      Re: Demonology?

      I think all seven sins are way more fun than anything Oracle can tempt me with.

  8. Morten Bjoernsvik

    Dopesick

    I just watched the Dopesick tvserie (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9174558/) and the Purdue Salesreps reminded me of Evil Reds audit team.

  9. FirstTangoInParis Silver badge

    Utter sharks

    So in $bigCompany, unplanned (and that having not started planning 18 months ago) expenditure is seriously frowned upon. If Oracle turned up at my place and demanded money with menaces for licenses they allowed us to use without charging in advance (I think there’s laws about that), they’d be told to show their working and we’d maybe get the money in 2 years. Perhaps that would stop them not capping license counts at what we’d pay for.

  10. CorwinX

    The defense against this BS is..

    Make sure that the company who does your financial audit... ie the accountants who sign off your yearly accounts and are legally empowered to do so... are also capable of doing software/hardware audits.

    Not just Oracle but anything IBM, Microsoft, Apple, maybe even Red Hat adjacent.

    It's a while since I was involved with this stuff but even way back in the day that you could run an app on all PCs and servers that would analyse and identify every bit of software running on every bit of kit.

    Online/Cloud apps a bit trickier but if you've got a 100 employees, and every single one of them has a laptop then that's max 200 seats.

    In which case why did you sign up to a per-install rather than per-user license?

    Do the independant audit and them tell any salesdroid to take a long hike off a short bridge.

    1. IHateWearingATie

      Re: The defense against this BS is..

      “Online/Cloud apps a bit trickier but if you've got a 100 employees, and every single one of them has a laptop then that's max 200 seats”

      That sounds like someone who hasn’t had to negotiate the byzantine set of rules that Oracle sets up in its licencing agreements.

      A company I worked with a few years ago got stung by an Oracle licence audit because they had bought the wrong type of cloud licence. The conversation could be boiled down to:

      “But we bought a cloud licence for this database? Look, it says ‘cloud’ on the box”

      “Ah, but when we said cloud, what we really meant was cloud, not cloud cloud. When you read the utterly ambiguous statements in the contract written in cuniform and so small you need a scanning electron microscope, you’ll see why you were wrong and now owe us $$$$”

      “But we explained in minute detail what our needs were, and the sales rep recommended this licence specifically for our purpose?”

      “Ah, but you also didn’t read the clause that says all our sales reps have room temperature IQs and cannot be trusted with anything sharper than a spoon, let alone be relied upon to recommend the right licence. Your problem, your liability.”

      Suffice to say, Oracle are on my ‘don’t touch with a 10 foot bargepole” list permanently.

  11. Georgski

    Who would voluntarily deal with this company

    Is Oracle (all of Oracle) purely a mainframe style business at this point?

    ie milking their old customers as hard as they possibly can,

    no matter the chilling effect on winning any new ones (word gets around).

    Because new customers just aren't a thing they are going for anymore?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Who would voluntarily deal with this company

      their piss poor vampirish behaviour reminds me of CA

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Who would voluntarily deal with this company

      At one time Sun SPARC/Solaris was the darling of backroom IT, as it just couldn't easily be beaten on performance per pound, but then Oracle bought Sun and it's slowly been winding it down. We're down from around 75 SPARC systems to just 8 now, we're looking to get rid of those as it's cheaper to move them into Azure cloud running Oracle RDBMS, dump the tin.

      There's still a lot of business for Oracle maintaining SPARC system hardware but time is running out as most people have moved off to smaller FOSS solutions or regengineered to use NoSQL and doc stores, as well as the venerable PostgreSQL. There's even a company out there that will sell you a frontend that can interpret Oracle calls but use a PostgreSQL backend, PG is very close to Oracle in a lot of respects.

      As a 25 year veteran Oracle DBA my advice is "run far, run fast" from anything to do with Oracle. The job might have paid off my mortgage but the glory days of Oracle, 1995-2010 are now long gone and they're just lumbering around like a demntia riddled dinosaur.

      1. NickHolland

        Re: Who would voluntarily deal with this company

        one picky detail: Oracle was not the downfall of Sun and SPARC. Sun and their products were already too expensive for the performance delivered by the time Oracle purchased them. The SPARC endgame was already clear. Commodity HW with a choice of OS was winning.

        But yes, I'm surprised "Get off Oracle" was not everyone's business plan 15 years ago.

      2. botfap

        Re: Who would voluntarily deal with this company

        Its never cheaper to move them into Azure cloud. Either you are a lazy boy or you haven't done your sums properly. In no way, shape or form is it cheaper to run Oracle services on Azure than it is on prem, even for a tiny number of servers (8 as you say). Even if you needed a single dedicated staff member for them, its still not cheaper

        Azure is roughly 3X the cost of Oracles own cloud services, even Oracles services that run inside Azure. Ive done the maths on this for tens of clients. Never in a single instance did it make financial sense to move on prem Oracle services to Azure

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Oracle's audit lampreys

    Once derided as a Big Red only thing, many went to Open Text where they continue to wreak havoc on unsupecting/careless customers.

    The two companies have funded widespread growth in legal firms skilled in stopping them from minutae audits focusing on every period, comma and loose definition from their EULAs.

    Just say no to both, migrate quickly to Open Source and put the screws to them!

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Been through a severe Oracle audit just once, next time I see one coming I'm just going to go straight my local dentist and get the most invasive root canal they do and have it on several teeth. That will be orders of magnitufe less painful and unpleasant than dealing with Oracle's auditing team. My advice is to hire a third-party company if you have a big estate, they will oversee your Oracle estate from a legal standpoint, advise you of what to check and where to check, we did it and the cost of using a a third-party overseer was easily recouped by the amount we saved with our Oracle licenses year on year.

    1. Not Yb Bronze badge

      " the cost of using a a third-party overseer was easily recouped"

      Why would anyone use software that requires a third-party to oversee complying with the license agreement(s)? This seems to me a questionable business decision in any business.

  14. Bitsminer Silver badge

    Big Discounts are on the table...

    So what.

    The annual maintenance fees are 22% OF LIST PRICE. That cost never changes. And maintenance fees seem to last forever.

    If "TCO" is not in managements' lexicon, flee.

  15. Matthew "The Worst Writer on the Internet" Saroff

    Could someone explain to me

    How a company so remarkably abusive to its customers manages to stay in business?

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