Oracle laying off hundreds in Santa Clara

my group billed the last Oracle deployment proposition for a full LOB disaster recovery contingency programme evaluation and priced it in units of median CxO option valuations.

Okay, that was the flippant part we kept to ourselves, but we did evaluate another BU's purported need for Oracle RAC in terms of economic impact, with a twist: we cited a board memo regarding the IT dept responsibilities that was phrased in terms of value to the corp in business continuity. We accounted for the impact of lost ROI on NREs and long term investment programmes such as select use of very high end storage kit to enable point in time recovery for virtually anything, for which we have a capacity provisioning budget, and itemised everwhere the Oracle RAC proposition was replicating existig IT budget with as yet evaluated risks. So we billed a advance iter departmental charge for a new evaluation of their proposal, plus potential HR drain on IT, plus a last killer factor: the question whether the Board should approve a diversion from a programme of IT investment secured a mere 4 years ago, which they are happy enough with to refer (indirectly) to in annual reports.

We went one further, we sent a formal request to Legal, for impact on our cient SLAs, where our systems could not be guaranteed (without new policies we furnished a budget for initial assessment and a timetable gantt chart) where we involved 3rd party liability: Would Oracle indemnify us if their systems in any way interacted with our SLAs, alternately what is the risk to that BU sales (separate document RFP sent to CFO) in event of a client crisis?

Needless to say, we were able to attach real enterprise wide costs _within the Oracle sales process itself _ far beyond their anticipated sale price, and the proposal died on the vine.

Detailed line items included inter departmental billing at contract rates for IT sitting in on planing meetings with Oracle, replete with citations from C Suite memos regarding unit costing and "matrix management", and examples of recent inter-dept. invoicing, and, the _coup de grace, a quote from Oracle themselves to provide the IT dept. the consultancy required to advise on the economic impact of a LOB data warehouse analysis installation on a non - Oracle ("greenfield"! ouch!) IT shop, so that we had from Oracle themselves a estimate at the least of their idea what time and manpower we needed to get the "best return" form that investment.

All the while, we spoke warmly about the (very real) robustness of Oracle in serious deployments, let out our misgivings of open source culture and development (we sell a commercial software service in a financial niche) and were entirely hospitable to the sales people Oracle sent. Sneakily, we led the introductions they needed, or would have needed, had we not, to use what i think is a very British expression "seen them coming from a distance".

The business where I work probably would never have existed without RDB, latterly Oracle, on VMS. I would not lightly denigrate Oracles ability, but i feel it is more like a teacher handing in a report card, bemoaning a brilliant child's talents that are being wasted, to praise Oracle in recent years.

Larry Ellison had - to my view - a superb chance when he slagged off cloud biz, quipping they did cloud since Kingdom Come....

.... Yes, now if Oracle had followed that up with letting people have full on geo clustered Oracle RAC plus bells & whistles in bundles at reasonable per user monthly simple contract rates, and explained, "Hey, we can do this, cloud is remote access, but cloud is not Five Nines and real time point in time backup when you run 100K queries a second, here are some usage budgeting plans that nobody else can dream of matching, OH AND it is Solaris/SPARC that enables this offering at this price point...."

Well, I am sure you get my drift,

I sadly think Larry was correct to dismiss, wrong to try to follow, and Terminally Wrong to not cannibalize their licensing model by making offerings that gave you true HA Oracle at low per user entry prices and linear scaled cost for size, latency, query ad query complexity rate.

What I would have done, were I Larry Ellison, would be to split off half of every product dev team to writing integrations with the competition's cloud offering.

Then I would open Per User accounted integration rates, to scoop the back end database off of any conceivable service you don't want to go down.

Every single product line, say PeopleSoft HR, I would pivot as high as half their developers to making say LinkedIN useful. LinkedIn takes 60 dollars or so per user per month, make Oracle the backend and charge 15 bucks per user per month, to let CxO folk feel happy a seriously robust back end is collating their sales interactions for one example, is how I would start my attrition of that revenue capture. If SalesForce gets 30 bucks a user on LinkedIN integration, I do not care if I get 20, I take that business away. I would target by customers who are deep int Oracle Financials, and build forecasting modules for them, to see LinkedIn data feed their analysis and forecasts.

I absolutely believe Oracle could be cannibalistic to many product revenues, whilst pivoting twice in this way:

- Pivot One: make Oracle RAC HA at least as cheap as per user SQL Server on Azure. (but with central linear scaled risers that ignore small enterprise and after say 50 users give a rational runtime fee for bigger databases)

Pivot Two: take half each product line developers, and task them to build integrations to every competitor in the same field. (this also is a twofold strategy, on one hand, make Oracle NOTCloud licensing support non Oracle uses at a low rate to get the data onto Oracle back end; then both undercut and offer price breaks for scaling DB size by adding further SLAs and support automatically as that scales up. Give No Reason for any cloud app to not have Oracle at the back end, Give a clear product cost ramp that competes with self hosting even without staffing costs DBAs etc)

Pivot Three: Take the remaining half of product line developers, and task them with Product,Next. The objective need to be make a small business accessible version of Oracle Financials, on a affordable cloud platform, and for high end, hire aggressively new data scientists to meet needs of big companies, either to develop products that make use of the cloud heterogenously or the data stores and silos and marts and all that stuff in intelligent ways, HA SLAs are throughout this a given, but now you charge per query or bulk deal.

This addresses:

1. dissing the cloud biz, pitching the world We've Doe That With 5 Nines Forever

2. Repositioning the CRUD style apps of Oracle's 1990s acquisiton spree by literally taking them off the market, and saying meanwhile, but we still know enough to tell you Cloud Competitor A is crap, so we'll give you the back end for nominal cost, because we value data above all, chances are were our customer before anyhow, We Care About Data Integrity And Availability; PeopleSoft.NEXT will make you want to come back again, it will leverage ANY cloud tech you got to enjoy whilst "out there in the wild" - "meanwhile we care you get the benefit a super back end and migration back to us will be zero pain" ; oh, and we are going properly open with web components with dotNEXT software allowing you to use components whereer you like however you like on web pages etc (This is telling customers, there is time worth waiting, BUT MORE CRUCIALLY it is telling customers they will get something they cant have with monolithic web apps from compeitors) all the while 50% of staff are there close up learning competing tech and helping Orcle customers use the Oracle DB back end to flow data etc up to busines sunits and CxOs.

3. Better way to retain talent, I am certain. The half of devs who work on competitor ware integration are being paid to learn very transferable skills (very!) . The other half get to kiss goodbye to overblown 90s CRUD and work with distributed systems at the heart of reliability which is definitely top tech forefront now when defining cloud by exposing like AWS Lambda and Azure Fabric

4. It hits the low end On Ramp of new customers - anyone using any cloud service to run any biz of any size can always look to Oracle for ensuring data integrity and reliability.

5. It hits the money no object and big corporation customers with a pivot to moving their contracts from paying for integration support to paying data scientists to extract value, and this has a new tier of pricing that can support high min value contracts and multi year contracts for that support -

6. follows the data science support pitch, Big Corps quickly get used to such support and help and insights. C Suites are addicted to this kind of rapid turnaround consultancy.

7. This Redefines Oracle as the Custodian of safe data in the cloud, and REFRESHES THE BRAND ORACLE as meaning truly Delphic Oracle, pun intended, a purveyor of data truths.

8. The On Ramp to Oracle starts EVERYWHERE THERE'S A NOTABLE B2B CLOUD SERVICE

9. IF COMPETING CLOUD COMPANIES ARE NOT OPEN (OUCH, THAT WOULD BE A BIG STONE TO THROW IN THE POND!) THEN ORACLE CAN CLAIM THIS IS NOT WHAT THE CLOUD IS ABOUT!!

10. 9 reinforces so much of Larry Ellison's cloud angst message, in a positive light that any board level executive can understand.

11. Oracle can say, OK, You Dont Have Our Tech, So We Now Compete On What You Say You Bring, and hire to ensure shaming.

12. I have to loathe personally the idea that cloud is closed cultures , and it takes a BIG company to force anything to be openly interoperable.

13.

I shall stop there, there are to many angles to what I am imagining and proposing I would do if I were Larrty Ellison.

But fundamentally i see Oracle is capable to regain the high ground and overtake the low competing grounds, of IT, any time it buckles up and puts its mouth on the line, and makes real Larry's condemnation of what the "cloud" is: cloud is neither easy reliability, nor easy (or at all) interoperability across services.

I believe Oracle would take on so many (happy) new smal customers whose needs are literally lights out so any revenue is almost free cflow, and at a Watson level, eat high level Strategic budgets that IT never gets ahold of but the accountant - consultancy majors eat instead - with teams of data scientists becoming the primary employee description you get access to when you can Oracle support.... Meanwhile they can push their optimisation products down the stack completely, eliminating much of what support often does, and I daresay they should then outsource all the trad tech support entirely, which can then be competitive, and create a positive ecosystem baseline instead of having Oracle suing support offering competitors for access to OTN.

I would LOVE to use Oracle, if they lived up to the potential they have.

Meanwhile, I learned so much in 30 years, from Oracle, how to operate as a player in the software world, they almost trained me to keep my department running happily, free from outside risks or fud, I almost could thank them, for a education I gained unpicking their sales and business techniques, that kept my responsibilities safe, even when I did elect to license Oracle for my firm.