Thread regarding Oracle Corp. layoffs

Customers have hated Oracle for a long time. Never understood why until I worked through the sun acquisition. Nearly every customer I spoke to said their company was pulling their sun kit (we used phones back then not support portals designed to keep them at bay). They already had to deal with big red for db and didn’t want or need to expand that relationship. In many cases that edict came from their top mgmt. That was over a decade ago.

You see, the customers had options. O wasn’t going to continue producing products they liked, such as sun ray and desktops. May as well go to cheap PCs and tablets.And smart phones. They didn’t need million dollar mega servers or 1990s storage tech. Got Dell, etc and Beowulf clusters and this new thing called the cloud. They sure didn’t need support to get any worse than it was.

You see my children, Oracle only really wanted Java so they could litigate their way back to relevance, including completely changing the software engineering landscape to put them back in control. Like they used to be with dbs back in the 90s.

This failed in spectacular fashion with the SCOTUS ruling this week.
Now what? What is Plan B? OCI? Sounds like there is plenty of churn in that space. And a lack of compelling use cases.

As a former sales rep for several years, no I do not have any faith in Oracle's future.

OCI sales were abysmal, to the point where field management (who used to concern themselves with multi-million dollar ULAs) started fretting over ~$1K OCI workloads because the business simply wasn't there. Cloud renewal rates were pitifully low, since a lot of the big cloud deals they touted in past years were nothing more than shelfware that got "baked in" to large on-prem deals. The on-prem license business was doing alright, but definitely shrinking year over year; I watched a few accounts either significantly cut SKUs from their ULA renewals, or give serious thought to not renewing entirely.

Every talented sales rep or manager I ever worked with has long since left the company for AWS, Salesforce, Google, Microsoft, etc. since Oracle's comp is flat-out not competitive. To add insult to injury, the comp plans somehow got even more unattainable with each year, and the cloud consumption-based comp plans were death on arrival for many reps. It's one thing to pay a garbage base salary, but it's another to find creative ways to avoid paying your reps for their deals. Turnover was always bad throughout my time with Oracle sales, but it just kept getting worse each year. I even watched a lot of leadership suddenly retire without warning in FY21, and my best guess is that they simply got fed up with the stress of managing a sinking ship with unattainable quotas. There was virtually no morale in the sales org by the time I left, and most reps were either hanging out or actively trying to get out to one of the aforementioned companies.

The customers I worked with overwhelmingly disliked Oracle, although in 2021 it was more of a passive dislike since they've largely written Oracle off as a legacy vendor for years now. Even with deals where OCI could be competitive on price, Oracle was rarely given a seat at the table. This outcome isn't particularly surprising though - when you strongarm your customers by playing audit/compliance police, have 20+ college kid sales reps blasting them with emails and calls for years on end, and charge an exorbitant amount for inept and unresponsive support, you can't expect customers to want to do business with you.

Just my two cents.

Future? Oracle? Somehow those two terms just don't fit together.

If Oracle burned to the ground I would bring a bag of marshmallows and green push my scumbag mgmt team in. Hhahahaha.. F Oracle.

Oracle will be fine. This forum is just a little echo chamber of people who are bitter

That would be a hard no.

Not that they can't change their future, but they WON'T.

In a word? H—LL NO !!!!

Zero.

What if I told you we were going to axe the entire hardware division?

Faith? No.

I personally don't, but I'll be happy to change my mind if you can tell me why we're not basically doomed.