There is a continued pattern of Sales "including" other apps as part of their purchase. They include a cost associated with these add-ons. After the contract is signed, we learn they never intended to use the add-ons. In our case, these add-ons are separate products or environments which have been provisioned. It becomes a time sensitive hunt to close the deal to convince the client to implement something they never intended to purchase. In the majority of our cases, we have one LOB which over 70% of the revenue is dead once the contract ends. How come the customers do not catch this and sign the contract? In some cases they are paying a lot of $$ for a product they never intend to use.
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As an ex-O Tech sales rep I just want to say that some of us do actually care about our customers and work to figure out how to balance our Cloud goaling with what the customer needs.
I had a customer that wanted to continue using our DB, wanted to add better controls for reporting and patching but had no interest in our Cloud. In fact they were years away from making ANY real Cloud decision. We managed to "financially engineer" the deal to get them what they wanted, along with a chunk of our Cloud. However, as they had no interest in our Cloud, they wouldn't give us any of their time to configure their Cloud credits appropriately. So what did I do? I worked with my team, including inside sales, ECA, pillars, Apps reps, etc. to create usable credits that would allow them to test a bunch of our PaaS and IaaS solutions. I looked at the projects they had, the issues they were dealing with and included many items that I didn't get paid on.
The frustrating part? The customer was running into a performance issue that they couldn't figure out the cause of and I explained that they actually had already purchased Cloud credits that they could use to analyze the data, including tools they did not own on-prem, that everything they needed was included and that I had a Customer Success person waiting anxiously to show them how to make it happen. To the best of my knowledge (before I was RIF'd), they never bothered to try using our Cloud so I have no idea whether we actually could've helped them.
The OP asked why the customer signs the contract and I have an answer for him; because it is in the customer's long term benefit if they plan to continue using our on-prem SW. If I can divert $1M of Support cost to Cloud today, next year that Support would've uplifted to $1.04M, then $1.08M, then $1.125M... By year 5, they are saving 20% on their Support bill, getting exactly the same SW they intended to get and have the choice of whether to actually use those Cloud credits they received or not. It's a long term win-win for the customer.
You know who loses? The people in O's Support organization. All of that revenue that once went into Support personnel is now going elsewhere, yet just as many customers running just as many licenses expect the same level of Support as before. Sales reps don't get paid on Support beyond the initial year, so it's no skin off them if the renewal $$ go down. At least until their customers start calling and complaining about Support issues... but that's already the case...
POSTE ITALIANE, Atos France,Donvand Limited, Home Office UK, Renfe , Engie It, LLOYDS, CMA CGM
this is short list of customers
In our region the Tech are refreshing all on-premise engineering systems with EXACM and Cloud machines.
This is also at finance/banks/insurance/public sector customers with partner "washing" the deals.
In UK our senior management leading and forcing inflating this actions which sadly gets the compliance organization exculpation and cover.
@PBw7DOg-piz : sadly true. I am involved in several cases of the like.
In one specific case we were discussing with a telco customer a refresh of their old X5 Exadatas, proposing X7 for a total of more than 10M$ to close in Q2.
as soon as the opp.ty has been pipelined, the kad and tech reps rushed to the customer proposing a "much better deal" with cloud, and asked systems team to stop and reshape the deal to include cloud.
net result: deal still pending since customer do not want any cloud and kad is trying to convince him, most probably we will end up selling much less $$, but with a large chunk of (most probably to be left unused) cloud universal credits.
so, big win for tech (expect a win story on this in Q4), big loss for systems and Oracle overall.
icing on the cake: LMS started an audit to "help customer understand how many uc they need" (exact word of the kad).
Off course there is no requirement for proof of customer PO from the partners and in some cases >1M$ just an POEU that no one examine in case they didn't split the orders into smaller ones bellow this threshold.
Can you share examples of such "cloud wins" ? (country/customer/partner names only)
Tech LOB uses partners to park IaaS & PaaS credits which were meant for customers in a 'buy on behalf' model. This is, of course, carved out from the on-premise license deal. The customers in most cases have no knowledge of the cloud credits. The Tech LOB sales rep and his/her mgt chain give each other high fives for the 'hard-fought' cloud win. The CSM is then assigned to help burn down the cloud credits. All is fine until it comes to renewal. And the laughable Compliance team will look the other way while partners are used to pre-load cloud credits.
Well, these are not real sales in the first place, just mere cloud washing to pay for audits, renewals, etc.
We noticed this unethical behavior in EMEA region mainly and no limited in countries like : UK, France , Spain , Italy, Israel.
The Technology LOB PaaS/IaaS are the dominate.
The compensation (and the internal culture) continues to incentivize each person to look out for themselves, compete against other internal teams and to do whatever it takes to get the customer to spend some money. It doesn't matter whether the end solution will solve the customer's issues or if a bigger win for Oracle could have been reached with some internal collaboration