There's life after Oracle, but very little left in Oracle's reseller channel

A headstone in Santa Clara carries the names of the fallen in Sun Microsystems’ once illustrious reseller channel – it is five years this week since grim reaper Oracle bought the server giant. It’s not that these companies hit the wall, more that some realised quickly that an agreement with Larry’s lot wasn’t going to work out …

[Otto is a bear.]

Not on the same planet as the rest of us

A long time ago dealing with Oracle and Sun was easy, and fun, the Oracle started to change, began not to care about small and incremental deals. They bought Sun, and it went from being easy to buy Sun kit to being nearly impossible.

Now, even for big deals, I feel we're being screwed.

"Oracle doesn’t value resellers because it is a big solutions company and as far as they are concerned their offer is unique, customers can’t buy it elsewhere"

Is just so true. Microsoft are far more friendly, but for really good people to deal with, it's the start-ups and SMEs that win hands down, until they sell out to Microsoft, Oracle, SAP et. al.

I look forward to visiting SMEs, but the big boys, it's always what line of %^&£%^ are they going to give us today. Oracle, sadly is the worst, I hope they have changed in the six months since I last had to deal with them, but I doubt it. Sad, I like the Database and Sun Kit, but don't recommend it any more.

[Jim 59]

Oracle

Larry has driven people into the arms of Linus.

[Jad]

We still use solaris ...

But we bought Fujitsu gear from the reseller ... a 1/3 of the cost of the Sun gear and they can provide the hardware support ...

[Pascal Monett]

Seems Ellison is forgetting a few basic rules about earning money

The first rule being : it's the small streams that make the great rivers.

Wanting to be on-site with the big accounts is all good and nice, but that does not mean that strangling everything else is a good move.

I understand, of course, that Oracle does not want to deal with small fry, but the Channel was there for that, except that now the Channel is running on fumes and will likely soon disappear.

Having your product in the big accounts is all nice and ego-building, but if you're only present there, you are at the mercy of a product change. Yes, big accounts have the Big Money that pays for fat contracts, but they also have the money to change their environment - and they will do so if they think it is cost-effective.

Oracle is, I think, painting itself into a corner. A comfy one for now, but a corner nonetheless.