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Comment by PunchTornado | Hacker News Reader

Oracle is at that stage where they didn't invent or do anything right in the last 5 years but try to get money from lawsuits.

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This is actually not true. Their cloud offering is doing really well. There's some impressive figures here:

http://realmoney.thestreet.com/articles/09/15/2016/oracles-c...

A more trickily written article you could not find. Oracle is busting their humps to get major ESC on their clouds but they've missed the chance on some of the really outlandishly big fish.

Time will tell if they manage to met BofA or a similar ultrabig FI and that could be called a success, but short of that all they can do is pay folks to write wrongheaded quarterly analysis and say "gosh isn't this better than Amazon?"

Which is totally absurd. Comically so.

And from the perspective of actually using their tech, you're better off scooping a mug of old compost and dumping it in a sizzling pan of oil and letting the oil spatter burn you. It will be a more enjoyable experience.

Growth rate is a nonsense metric. If you're starting from nothing and invest a shitload of money in sales you'll have an amazing growth rate. IBM and Oracle are both way behind azure, google and aws.

I have a friend who works at IBM he tells me that IBM uses Google cloud for some of their stuff. The irony when you are a cloud provider but use another service.

I mean, that in and of itself ain't really ironic. Lots of cloud providers out there just resell abstractions around / improvements upon other cloud providers. Cloud66 is one with which I'm familiar; their whole business model revolves around wrapping AWS with CloudFoundry-like deployment mechanisms specifically for Ruby codebases (and Docker containers, but I never interacted with them in that capacity).

Yes, and note that IBM do a lot of Oracle support.

>"The figures come even though--as mentioned in the earnings report headline--Oracle's SaaS/PaaS revenue rose 77% in dollars and 79% in CC, totaling $798 million "

$800 million from their cloud offering in a single quarter is nonsense?

Maybe not, but that number doesn't tell the whole story. This is revenue. How much are they spending on R&D, infrastructure, marketing, etc. for their cloud business? How fast is that spending's growth in relative to the revenue?

Just like IBM is the leader in cloud solutions, did you hear? It's smoke and mirrors to make sure that when the next quarter rolls around, they have some growth to show in what the market believes is "the next big thing".

IBM is such a leader in cloud computing that they have their employees use Box instead of SoftLayer. Any company that can't even eat their own dog food are incompetent and should be avoided.

I'd view their numbers with some doubt, given that there has been a whistle-blower lawsuit related to it: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-oracle-lawsuit-accounting-...

From what I've been told by a contact in their database sales team is that there pipeline for on-premise licenses is drying up quickly but their SaaS business is doing well.

Just to add a little nuance - the difference is in flow vs stock of customers. Very few existing EBS customers are reimplementing in Cloud because of the time, cost, and loss of customizations. It doesn't make sense.

New customers are being forced into Cloud by the Oracle sales team. The sales reps literally receive no compensation for on-prem (EBS) deals, and they must go through a lengthy approval process just to offer a prospect the on-prem solution. Thus everyone is being guided to Cloud, whether or not it is the right solution for the customer.

> Very few existing EBS customers are reimplementing in Cloud because of the time, cost, and loss of customizations.

Also, maybe Oracle's "lock your customers in and then extract as much profit as possible" history is guiding decisions? If there's a rearchitecture cost to migrate to cloud, then why would you do it with a company who already $&#@ed you over?

The exception is if they peddle a Sun hardware solution. They will be slobbering like a dog with a bone if you show any interest.

> pipeline for on-premise licenses

Sorry for being a grammar nazi, but this one is a serious pet peeve. The singular of "premises" isn't "premise", it's "premises".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premises

Well, as a member of the post-WWII Stasi, I'd like to point out that English generally has no universally accepted authoritative form of the language to which you can persuasively appeal :)

TIL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-premises_software

I'm not sure that's correct. The pluralization is for licenses not on-premise.

Either way "on-premises licenses" sounds weird so I'm likely to stick with "on-premise licenses" regardless. Sorry.

Premises (singular) is a location. He was on the premises.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/on%20premises

Premise (singular) is a presupposition. The premise is that we can get this done in 3 weeks.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/premise

I agree, it sounds weird. I'd avoid it all together and use on-site.

Edit to add: or, as uncle-comment (?) pointed out with the Wikipedia article, on-premises software is a thing. On-prem might be a good compromise, depending on your penchant for shortening like that.

Either way "on-premises licenses" sounds weird so I'm likely to stick with "on-premise licenses" regardless. Sorry.

Downvoted for expressing contempt for the English language and common decency, but then failing to add in the obvious "irregardless."

> ...pipeline for on-premise licenses is drying up quickly but their SaaS business is doing well...

I hear they are desperately pushing new cloud offerings, but they are having lots of problems with customer retention, as their cloud technology is really not ready so they are actually just selling hosted versions of the existing products that lack any cost advantage.

> they are actually just selling hosted versions of the existing products

Ha, if that were true, it wouldn't even be that bad. In the niche I work for, what they sell is not even as powerful as their existing on-premises product.

Not that it matters: they simply won't sell or even develop new on-premises, so you either go to their crappy cloud services or you just migrate away. There are now entire companies based on "move your existing Oracle solutions to our product with the minimum fuss and enjoy real power, not a cut-down version of what you already had three years ago".

That explains a lot about their recent behavior, e.g. dropping Solaris. If everyone is consuming their software over a network, it doesn't matter precisely what it's running on any more (so even if Oracle DBs could scale better on Solaris than on Linux or a BSD, a 1.3x SaaS shared-cluster size costs less than an OS development team.)

They're not dropping Solaris. They're instead changing the release model:

https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris/entry/oracle_solaris_moving...

Personally, I'd say this is similar to Microsoft's decisions around Windows 10.

And that is what they call spin. Didn't they fire the people who write it?

No, they did not. How do I know? Because I'm still working on Solaris almost nine years later along with many others. Same manager, same projects.

Staffing levels in some areas was changed as was publicly announced.

Disclaimer: these are my opinions and not those of my employer.

Sorry, it was reported that the job losses at Oracle were from the Solaris team. I read the memo from Oracle on Solaris 12 and was (and am) completely unconvinced by it, but maybe I am just cynical. I am still moving away from it as fast as I can convince the board to back me. Good luck on the Solaris team, some good things could come out of it (with some open source licensing). Oracle could do themselves some serious reputational favours by staying out of court.

Only 5 years? Seems like it's been longer than that

they have graal, sulong, I also cloud is doing fine :)

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