Just read an interesting article on why customers are reluctant to move to the "Oracle Cloud." Sadly the pivot to the cloud will impact every employee at Oracle. Starting with sales first. You wont be able to survive the train wreck. What used to work in the old days, is seen as anathema in the new cloud world. Customer's don't want vendor lock in. This is 100% what they get form Oracle.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2017/07/11/oracles-cloud-strategy-ruthless-or-byzantine/
Here are a few snippets:
Oracle Strategy #1: Locking in Customers
Customer lock-in has been an enterprise software vendor strategy since the dawn of enterprise software – and in the early days, the fact that software was proprietary and lacked open interfaces essentially required companies to buy much of their gear from the same vendor.
Today, in contrast, the prevalence of open source software and open APIs empowers companies to purchase the best tool for the job – and thus, vendors must compete on quality and overall customer value.
Not Oracle. In fact, customer lock-in is one of its explicit strategies. “In the product called Exadata, our engineered systems, we actually build the hardware and the software together to optimize it for Oracle IP [intellectual property],” explained Oracle co-CEO Mark Hurd on CNBC on October 26, 2015.
Engineering underlying hardware systems to optimize for the software running on them is the reverse of what most other vendors do. Oracle’s biggest nemesis in the public cloud space, AWS from Amazon.com AMZN +0.13%, would have never got off the ground if it optimized its infrastructure for its own software.
Oracle Strategy #2: Using Draconian Licensing Policies to Extort Customers
Oracle insiders have a term for this strategy: the ‘nuclear option.’ “It involves pressuring some of its customers to add cloud to their contracts that they neither want nor plan to use,” explained Julie Bort, chief tech correspondent for Business Insider. “It refers to something known as a ‘breach notice.’”
Here’s how the scheme works: Oracle licenses its software under complex – some would say ‘Byzantine’ – legal conditions. Complex software licenses are common for enterprise vendors, but Oracle takes this strategy further than most of its competition.
The secret: tricking customers into using features they haven’t licensed. “Oracle’s licensing policies are notoriously vague and confusing,” said Robert Sheldon, technical consultant writing for TechTarget’s SearchOracle. “One misstep and you can end up owing thousands of dollars in audit fees. Yet Oracle software, with its dazzling array of management packs and pre-installed options, is easy to misuse.”
Sheldon continues: “The challenge with Oracle software, in particular, is that product options and management packs are installed with the main products and enabled by default.”
Once a customer has fallen into this trap, Oracle sends it a breach notice, and then sends in a team to conduct a software license audit. Bringing a customer into compliance, however, isn’t Oracle’s primary goal – selling them services they may not want or need is. “These days, to make the breach notice go away — or to reduce an outrageously high out-of-compliance fine — an Oracle sales rep often wants the customer to add cloud ‘credits’ to the contract,” Bort said.
Oracle Strategy #3: Gouging Customers
Ask an Oracle employee – either current or former – and they will likely agree that the company has always had a ruthless focus on the bottom line. As a public company, its management’s remit is to maximize shareholder value, and if ruthlessness works, then so be it.
However, while many of its competitors put innovation and customer value high on their lists of strategic priorities, for Oracle, these core goals are secondary to delivering on the margins necessary to drive short-term profitability and growth.