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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

It's Oracle. Safra is super close to the administration [1]. The only reason this contract is out of the hands of Booz Allen et al is Oracle. This might be the worst-kept tech secret in D.C.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-12/trump-tea...

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There was an article in The Register a couple weeks ago about a pension fund suing Oracle over their excessive cloud hype, and what sounds like outright threats to punish customers who don't try it out. From the piece:

The complaint alleged Oracle has been coercing customers to adopt its cloud services, to inflate revenue and hide market disinterest.

"In truth, Oracle drove sales of cloud products using threats and extortive tactics," the complaint, filed on Friday, stated. "The use of such tactics concealed the lack of real demand for Oracle’s cloud services, making the growth unsustainable (and ultimately driving away customers)."

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/13/oracle_sued_cloud_n...

I read something similar on a German IT news site a while back. It claimed that Oracle's sales people pressured customers into buying cloud services, and if the customers did not "comply", they were threatened with a license audit that apparently included suspending the customers' licenses until the audit was completed. And if your ERP system is supplied by Oracle, or the database your ERP system runs on (or your financial accounting package), that means you can basically shut down your company until the audit is complete.

That's when you go along with their demands for just as long as it takes to get completely off their products/systems all together.

...and the Oracle sales folk won't care - as long as they meet their (current) targets. Be very careful about the behaviors you incentivize.

Oracle is a cancer. Their hostility to their own customers is inexcusable. My company recently suffered through an Oracle audit, and we're being basically extorted to buy Oracle cloud products to avoid a lawsuit.

Their corporate culture is just rotten from the top down. Their sales reps' word is worthless, and the attitude is not "How can I help the customer," but "What's my leverage?" Sales people are trained not to find the right fit for their customers, but to exploit their ignorance. They take advantage of customers using opaque terms of service, bullying tactics, and outright deception. It's like they got their business ethics from watching Goodfellas and The Sopranos.

Oracle is currently buying out entire DC Metro stations with ad campaigns that consist of the words "ORACLE CLOUD" in white text on a bright red background, so I would imagine this is all part of one big ham-fisted strategy.

Or course it's Oracle. Given how much of the rest of the US government they have by the short hairs, they're desperately trying to legitimize their last-horse entry into cloud computing by leveraging existing relationships as hard as possible.

I don't need a 100-page dossier to see that, even from here in the midwest.

I can't believe Oracle would do something so underhanded and unethical. Oh, wait. Yes, I can believe that.

Oracle was my first guess too, but this isn't exactly proof either.

Booze Allen and Oracle should both be banned from government contracts like this. Considering their histories they are clearly inept.

Is your reference behind a paywall ?

You could always click it and find out.

What are you insinuating? Booz Allen isn't even a cloud provider at all. They will likely inevitably be involved in the rollout regardless of who the gov goes with, AWS, GCP, Azure etc. but I'm not sure what your point is.

I'm also genuinely confused by Oracle being pulled into this, are their execs really so deluded that they think they could actually win this contract or is this just a wild guess?

So you were hoping that Booz Allen Hamilton would have some kind of role in helping the gov't procure this important service? Have you ever met them?

> you were hoping that Booz Allen Hamilton would have some kind of role

I have no horse in this race. Not sure how you got that impression.

I have. They're awful

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