Reply to post: Oracle is a business risk

Former Oracle execs warn that Big Red's auditing process is also a 'sales enablement tool'

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Oracle is a business risk

In the days of Oracle 6 and 7 we ran nearly everything on that platform. We had a great deal from Oracle for the campus and we could run as many teaching and administration systems as we wanted. We specified it as our platform of choice for suppliers and they were happy to deliver it.

We got stung by a few licensing "audits" where tools had got enabled by accident - you just had to push the "sql tuning" button in Enterprise Manager for a £30,000 bill to arrive. No warning. Or you used the "compress=all" option instead of "compress=meta" on a backup to trigger a bill for using the compression tool.

We added Oracle to our business risk register and have now migrated most of our tools away from it. We've got a couple of legacy tools left and all of those are scheduled to be replaced. AWS Aurora Postgres has proved an outstanding replacement for our home built tools and the rest are in the cloud and "someone else's problem".

The sales team are well aware that their clients view licensing as the major drawback to Oracle adoption. The software is great, but the licensing is a liability that customers are not willing to take on.

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