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Comment by meddlepal | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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