In all the negativity, here is somebody who believes that Oracle is actually on the way to nirvana (his words, not mine.)
If you were to believe the financial analysts, Oracle is on a road to nowhere. That’s typical of the short-term thinking that dominates their assessments of vendors whose products take many years to get right and live long lives.
https://diginomica.com/2018/05/09/is-oracle-on-schedule/
I do not mind hearing opposing views. I find this article to be flawed, at best. Will leave it at this.
Oracle pays me on schedule. Cannot complain about this. Everything else is just bad.
"Oracle has missed the opportunity to capture cloud customers while they are moving out of on-premise tools."
I disagree on one front -- SaaS. For existing customers who have an on-premise environment, Oracle is the only game in town for moving to a full SaaS model. By default, Oracle's "Cloud" wins.
There will be customers who Oracle doesn't capture that way though. Some will choose to migrate to SAP, Workday, Salesforce, etc. and will pull the plug on their Oracle licenses. Others will take their existing licenses, plan to handle the ongoing maintenance/upgrade workload for the eBusiness apps and will deploy to another Cloud if they can.
So Oracle is able to keep some customer and the cash flow that goes with them. That still is a net loss though. That is why NetSuite is important for Oracle right now -- it's a Cloud solution that seems to work reasonably well and (more importantly) addresses the small/medium market where Oracle's reputation hasn't (yet) been ruined. NetSuite offers the potential for Oracle to hold the line on overall margins and avoid having its stock price implode. Not to mention that Oracle has significant assets that they can play financial games with while they wait for the NetSuite promise to kick in. We likely will see declining quarterly revenues from Oracle, but that can go on for quite some time while the top executives still draw immense income -- just look at IBM and GR.
Plus, I believe that LE only really works for himself. If the cloud is a failure, that's a reason for him to cash in on acquisitions like NetSuite. What else does LE own a large part of that he can acquire to make himself a bundle? I don't think he cares about in-house cloud development. He make more money for himself with a failing cloud and acquisitions.
It is a new Waterloo.
That’s typical of the short-term thinking that dominates their assessments of vendors whose products take many years to get right and live long lives.
Oracle has blown too many chances and at the end of the whole thing is a severely dysfunctional engineering organization where most of the managers are incompetent and have no idea what they are doing. I was there, I know.
Oracle cloud will not be a product that takes "many years to get right". It's already over with right now. The engineering organization that created the mess is not going to suddenly start doing the right things, because the inept, narcissistic, sociopathic idiots that make up the management are capable only of manipulation, dirty tricks and lies.
Someone said TK doesn't take input from beneath him... this is just the tip of the iceberg.... no one I met in the management at Oracle can take input from beneath them. They attack and sabotage anyone speaking the truth or anyone that shows any real competence at the developer level.
Engineering is one large clusterf--k of incompetence and over-blown egos. Managers are never held responsible for anything and are never removed/fired. It will never change.
If by some miracle, over the next few years, Oracle does get the "cloud" together, it will be too late. Customers will have moved to the platforms that are available today and will be extremely reluctant to make changes. Oracle has missed the opportunity to capture cloud customers while they are moving out of on-premise tools. This opportunity will never come again.
As in the SA article, growth occurs on the front end. Once customers have spent the big bucks moving to a cloud architecture, they are not going to want to do that again. This is a one-time opportunity Oracle has missed.
In addition, by the time Oracle spends a few years developing their cloud, the world will have moved on, and features never dreamed of right now will be in existence. It is a losing battle for Oracle, they have missed the one opportunity to cash in on cloud and the future will not get better.
Incompetent engineering coupled with having missed the one-time opportunity to convert customers to cloud will kill the possibility. This is really over with. This year will be quarter after quarter of decline with stock going down the tubes.
Look at who sponsors the site and who funds their travel to conferences. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.
The author lost all credibility with the part:
“I am not a financial analyst; I am a software analyst. I deal with numbers, but I care much more about whether or not products work than what they cost or how profitable they are. ...
When Fusion (as the original cloud solution was called) was first mooted, Ellison did make the monumental blunder of assuming it would be a relatively fast rewrite. He’s on record as acknowledging that. And I give him and the company a lot of credit for NOT rushing to the market with a half-c---ed product but investing to get the solution set right.”
Fusion, when released, was very much a half-c---ed product. I was there.
Fusion, when designed, was not meant to be a cloud solution. That wasn’t the vision. Any analyst just needs to go back to the original announcements and briefings: Cloud/SaaS was not mentioned. And the designs didn’t consider it. The results of that lack of vision are plaguing the suite to this day.
As a software analyst the author should know that. And some numbers don’t lie: zero revenue growth despite many billions of acquisitions is hard to explain as a success.
I do agree that the seekingalpha story was to some degree at least garbage. No surprise ... standard for SA. Comparing Oracle with Adobe/AutoDesk makes little sense. How about do comparing the ORCL cloud transition to MSFT, though? Both have large legacy “on premises” businesses (RDBMS, Windows, Office), business apps, and a development tools stack. Who did better transitioning the company to the cloud - Catz/Hurd or Nadella?
No shortage of idiots in this world