Oracle "Clown" Strategy aka "Pivot to the Clown"

Its been awhile since I was at Oracle, but it was a fun ride. Back in the day Oracle was filled with seasoned professionals that really knew their stuff. When MH came in we knew the ride was over. I left back in 2012 when he practically doubled the sales quotas overnight. You could literally see the resumes flying off the printers.

I'd like to share my perspective on what is going on inside Oracle I still have friends there. I work at a competitor now, I will let you know my bias. Here is what I see and hear first hand from people still inside Oracle or have recently left. This is what the customers hear from us and we have the fresh hires from Oracle to prove it.

The Oracle cloud is very much vapor ware with only one real data center in phoenix with 3 availability zones. Oracle sales can't even do real demos. Oracle just now decided to build 12 data centers in 2018. Literally a decade after Amazon made its investment.

Oracle sales reps are being replaced by cold calling college graduates. Oracle support is being gutted and off shored. Product development is being cut to the bone. The customers we talk to are made fully aware of all these facts and are told to ask Oracle to do a real POC and ask in advance where the data centers hosting cloud are located. The are told to ask about the connectivity between "Bare Metal, or Next Gen Cloud" and the "Oracle Exadata Cloud Service" or how the Oracle Apps running on cloud comminicate with the other services. We tell them to ask about network traffic, how big the pipes are and how things will work in a dedicated compute environment.

Then we follow up with the customer and laugh out loud together. One customer told us they asked how soon they could move to the Exadata cloud service if they signed a contract today. The Oracle sales team responded that they would have to Order the Exadata machine have it shipped to the Oracle datacenter, network it and could have it ready in six weeks.

Oracle is literally seen as a clown provider, not a cloud provider. We are crushing it, leaving Oracle in the dust. I'm not saying anything about the Oracle competition here. I don't have to. Oracle is tripping over itself and looking like a fool all on its own.

Everyone that watched MH on CNBC recently talk about cloud knew he was lying. We didn't need the nose touch. All I can say is best of luck and with less than 4% unemployment we are waiting for you to get laid off so we can hire you and have you tell customers what Oracle is like on the inside. The only loser here is Oracle and MH. If you get laid off good riddance to Oracle, take the check and run.

One person is responsible for the whole fiasco he will go down in history as one of the biggest clown CEOs of all time.

Comment! It's anonymous!

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Yep, SUNW all over again. Two devastating errors in the 2000s. First, x86 Solaris was canned. Then Ponyboy gave away the store while customers fled to Linux clusters. Bonus points if you can draw the line between those two blunders and the rise of AWS.

Great post: @T1C33gv-2auo

You have a very high level view of the issues which is the root of a lot of problems. In addition to what you say took place at the top, there is systematic abuse of employees that only adds to competent people fleeing the company.

Top to bottom, incompetent management, corruption, dirty tricks inside and out. Oracle is a corrupt shell of what it used to be. It's sad to see, but the facts are the facts. There is life on the outside. If you are not one of the Country Club set, then get out as soon as you can.

I second this: @T1C33gv-2auo wow !

@T1C33gv-2auo wow !

Brillantissim !!!

At least a post with facts and very good arguments !

Many thanks for that.

Kind regards.

I left Oracle last year. It is not accurate to say that Oracle Cloud is "vaporware" - it is real and a few customers use it - but it is not competitive with AWS, Google, or Azure. LE, MH, and SC made the wrong decisions in the 2009-2012 time period (actually, 2009 to today), investing billions in on-premise hardware development and casting off AWS as a non-threat. I still heard high-ranking sales managers last year say "AWS is just for a couple of developers in a garage." In 2013, they acquired Nimbula for the purpose of competing against VmWare. Yeah, right. Then in 2014, they realized that they had made a mistake and that Cloud vendors were eating Oracle's lunch. With SC"s obsession with margins, they tried to do cloud on the cheap. They leased data center space from Equinix in Elk Grove and Ashburn and tried to build a cloud based on Nimbula. Thiis did not scale. Then in 2016, they again realized that they had made a mistake, hired developers from AWS, and set up Gen 2 / Bare metal cloud in a data center in Phoenix. The problem is that there are now two Oracle Clouds, neither of which are funded adequately. Some services run only in Gen 1, some only in Gen 2, and certifications like HIPAA and FedRAMP are way behind competitors. Simply sticking an Exadata machine in Oracle's data center is not "Cloud" as there is no on-demand scaling. When you run out of storage, you call Oracle sales, place a big order to upgrade Exadata, and then wait several weeks for the system to be installed. With other Cloud vendors, you push and button and get more storage immediately. There isn't sufficient capacity in Oracle cloud, and SC continues her just in time" strategy, waiting for an order before provisioning a new system. There is a tiny ecosystem (e.g. partners) compared to the big three. AWS doesn't care about margins, and Google has $30 billion to spend on Cloud infrastructure. Oracle is continuing to fall further behind. Oracle would need to invest at this level to catch up, but they do not have that kind of money. Oracle's customers are also very unhappy with Oracle's licensing policies, e.g. forcing customers to license every machine in a data center if they use VmWare, aggressively and obnoxiously pushing audits, doubling the price of running Oracle software in AWS, refusing to support Google Cloud, etc. Customers are moving away from Oracle. MH and SC have satisfied investors so far, keeping the stock price up, paying dividends, and cashing in 9-figure stock options for themselves. We are starting see, slowly, that Wall Street is realizing that the emperor has no clothes.

@T1C33gv-1xez

@T1C33gv-1ssy

You should spew your propaganda elsewhere. Everyone on this board knows these are lies.

F.A.K.E. news

Most industry analysts agree that PaaS based on Fusion Middleware is beating competition.

Fake news. Customers see real advantages offered by Bare Metal Cloud and autonomous database and migrate to new generation cloud in droves.

"Oracle just now decided to build 12 data centers in 2018."

Correction -- Oracle has decided to lease or partner for 12 data centers in 2018. And they still haven't connected their existing data centers together. And they still lack the points of presence that the major Cloud providers have. This is all an effort to add a bunch of dots on a global map to make more false claims about Oracle's Cloud and how it is beating all of the competition.

"The customers we talk to are made fully aware of all these facts and are told to ask Oracle to do a real POC and ask in advance where the data centers hosting cloud are located. The are told to ask about the connectivity between "Bare Metal, or Next Gen Cloud" and the "Oracle Exadata Cloud Service" or how the Oracle Apps running on cloud comminicate with the other services. We tell them to ask about network traffic, how big the pipes are and how things will work in a dedicated compute environment."

Other than "ask in advance where the data centers hosting cloud are located", try "Ask whether Oracle leases or owns its own data centers". Everything else still holds true.

At best, Oracle is offering hosting services. That means that it probably will be able to hold onto customers who are highly dependent on its SaaS offerings and its global push is likely to benefit its NetSuite offerings. Outside of that, it might be able to convince some customers to host their databases in an Oracle leased location as long as the latency to one of the major Cloud providers is low enough so that everything else can be hosted in a real Cloud.

This translates to a lot of pain for those in field sales roles. Those tied to applications sales have the best shot of holding onto a job for a while. Those with marquee customers and/or impending deals have slightly better odds too. Everyone else is going to see declining commissions/bonuses and be wondering when the next round of layoffs is going to come. My suggestion is to brush up the resume and gain training on the latest set of skills (the large Cloud providers have free accounts along with examples/tutorials and there are some decent, inexpensive courses at places like Udemy) regardless of whether you are looking to make a move or are waiting it all out.

"Most financial analysts agree that Bare Metal Cloud is winning. With it's unparalelled performance..."

Winning how?

Raw performance -- maybe.

Financial results for Oracle? Meeting customer's needs? Competing on cost/performance ratio? Not a chance.

Showing everyone that you are a troll? Absolutely.

Most financial analysts agree that Bare Metal Cloud is winning. With it's unparalelled performance AWS and others are so far behind it's not even funny. That explains huge customer demand and inevitable delays in providing new hardware.

You are just the real proof the oracle cheerleaders are clueless and stupids.

You have no proof and don't even know what you are talking about.

poor idiot ...

thats why all engineered systems coming online are sold already.

You mean the fully occupied 2 Exadata Racks in the rented data center in Chicago / Ashburn? Those fully "occupied" racks are sitting idle because they were given away as cloud credits. The reason the customer has to wait for an Exdata cloud service is because it does not exist.

If a customer is dumb enough to pay 5 times the cost an on premises Exadata to rent one in the cloud, then Oracle will gladly build one and ship it to a rented data center. Just wait 6 weeks and we will "elastically" scale your Exadata in the clown cloud.

Most financial analysts agree that Bare Metal Cloud is winning. With it's unparalelled performance AWS and others are so far behind it's not even funny. That explains huge customer demand and inevitable delays in providing new hardware.

OK, then where's your proof? Got an article? Anything?

Fake news. There is a backlog of customers switching from AWS, Azul, Google etc - thats why all

engineered systems coming online are sold already.

This is internal propaganda, intended to deceive people into staying put. This is not real.

Fake news. There is a backlog of customers switching from AWS, Azul, Google etc - thats why all

engineered systems coming online are sold already.

They have been saying stuff like this for well over a year now, but revenue growth keeps slowing down every quarter. The numbers don't lie.

Fake news. There is a backlog of customers switching from AWS, Azul, Google etc - thats why all engineered systems coming online are sold already.

Yeah, yeah, they must be switching "in droves".... LOL

Then we follow up with the customer and laugh out loud together.

Priceless

Fake news. There is a backlog of customers switching from AWS, Azul, Google etc - thats why all engineered systems coming online are sold already.

This OP IS 100% TRUTH.

As a current employee of oracle working on a major “lighthouse” account, I can attest that it is 100% accurate and truthful.

Whoever the OP is, they are not wrong.

I’ve got anew job lined up and am happy to let ORCL pay me till they decide not to. The way they run the company, treat customers and employees, they deserve what they get. It’s just coming full circle back to them. ☝️

@T1C33gv-mvi

you are an idiot.

You provide no added value.

OP is 100% right and you cannot argue so you say "fake new".

You are without any doubt a disgruntled oracle employee. We professional Experts dealing with customers notice how they are pissed off with oracle, and their ridiculous oracle global support who are not able to answer very basic questions.

@T1C33gv-mvi you are a pathetic idiot.

Next time try to at least argue ...

You know, severance is not guaranteed. That “big check” going out the door could be your unused vacation and whatever they owe you for wages, period. If you have a better offer, GO! And don’t look back.

MOCA !!!

Make Oracle Clown Again !!!

Fake post, you are not a former employee but a disgruntled employee who either was just RIFed or is soon about to be RIFed.

Love it! Clown as a Service - that’s you LE!

Love the phrase "pivot to the clown". LOL. Says a lot.

Those of us on the inside know what a mess everything is. A lot of us are actually hoping for layoffs, so we can get a package on the way out the door. Everyone knows oracle cloud is dead.

It's a real mess, people are jerked around, projects come and go with the whims of upper management, psycho managers manipulate and hold tight control over employees. No one wants to work here, we just want out.

Please, please, lay us off end of May. We can't take it anymore.

Thread regarding Oracle Corp. layoffs

Oracle "Clown" Strategy aka "Pivot to the Clown"

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