Why Zoom Chose Oracle | Hacker News Reader

Why Zoom Chose Oracle

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147 pointsceohockey60119 comments

I thought Corey Quinn's take was very smart: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23013960.

According to him, the cost of bandwidth is probably the issue, and would make Oracle a compelling choice even if Zoom didn't have negotiating leverage.

Nota bene: it gives me no joy to say good things about Oracle. I hope it will not happen again.

Yeah, the other clouds charge way too much for bandwidth. For zoom this is probably their dominant cost. Also transfer between zones is expensive: $0.02/GB at AWS. And you typically need that if you're going to make any highly available system.

Zoom wouldn’t pay list. Realize cloud providers can provide offline pricing to Zoom that would match or beat the oracle network pricing for a “like” offering.

Things like fixed cost throughput links, and fixed network pricing is available with contracting for large companies.

It’s likely oracle simply “bought the business” and is loosing money on the hosting. Hoping to make it up with a co-sell commission based contract, or by leveraging this as PR/marketing.

Cory Quinn is right. List price is expensive. But if you spend 1mil/year or more you shouldn’t be paying list. If you are zoom getting 90% off egress is totally negotiable.

Of course, Zoom won't pay list. But they also won't pay list on Oracle either. I wouldn't trust the "10x" comparison, but the bottom line that it's more expensive seems reasonable.

Corey Quinn seems like a smart guy with a lot of connections. If he doesn't regularly have big fish in the AWS ecosystem telling him (off the record!) "here's the deals we got", he's not doing his job right.

If someone similarly knowledge comes back and say "actually, Oracle doesn't beat AWS on bandwidth when you're a big fish", I'll say not to trust this article.

I’ve never done a negotiation with Oracle, but I’ve seen the AWS bills of a couple of their biggest customers.

AWS technically doesn’t do discounts. They just invent new usage tiers with phenomenal pricing. Which effectively means bulk discounts.

I’m sure Zoom is getting a great deal on outbound bandwidth. Especially since they are multi-cloud and can shift traffic between providers at a whim to squeeze their providers.

Ironically they would probably qualify for much bigger discounts if all of their workloads were in a single cloud.

Thanks, this is interesting.

But it's not 100% clear to me: are you saying it's likely their AWS bill is low enough to invalidate this analysis?

Also, if they're as cloud agnostic as it sounds, wouldn't they have evaluated the cost-savings of single cloud while negotiating?

I have no idea since I've never tried to negotiate with Oracle Cloud. I don't know how hard they negotiate (but it's Oracle so probably pretty hard).

I'd say the analysis is accurate in directionality but maybe not magnitude.

But more importantly I think it's just Corey's way of poking Amazon about their high prices. :)

But I will say that Amazon is pretty clear that you'll get a better discount if your workload is 100% with them. Like if you put 1/3 of your workload in AWS, it will be more than 1/3 the price of putting your whole workload there. Or to put another way, if you triple your workload you won't triple your price.

>>> I don't know how hard they negotiate (but it's Oracle so probably pretty hard).

Can't be too hard. It's Oracle so they let you in nicely enough, then they screw you later when you're locked in, increasing cost substantially on every renewal, changing terms and billing arbitrary things.

I think Zoom could get away with any terms really (AWS is not hard to beat on bandwidth to begin with). Oracle cloud is desperate for customers, even more than Azure and GCP, but Oracle has the willingness to increase costs tenfold and change terms arbitrarily later unlike competitors, so all things considered don't expect them to have too much regards for the (initial) terms.

On the database they are notorious for trying to charge test databases (normally don't need a full license), any server they can find (up to you to evidence it's not running oracle) or even your entire virtualized datacenter because VMs can migrate so the entire datacenter should be the machine when it comes to billing and they bill by core.

Also, AWS doesn't get much PR value from landing Zoom. Nor would Google. Azure I couldn't say but let's assume 'moderate' and put Oracle at 'high'.

From a PR standpoint it makes sense for Oracle to offer Zoom a deal that they initially make no money off of, bask in the PR value, and prioritize work that reduces the labor and equipment cost for managing a customer like Zoom until they do make money.

What work is AWS or Google going to do to reduce overhead on a Zoom-sized customer today? Wouldn't they have already done it?

Google needs good PR fare more than Azure though. Azure is doing very well, much better than GCP.

To reinforce your point, Zoom is already heavily on both AWS and Azure, and I’m sure they’ve both seen massive increased spend from Zoom over the last couple months. But of course you don’t hear any of that from a PR standpoint because it’s really just business as usual as far as they are concerned.

The Oracle news is news because it’s a deviation from the business as usual, I suppose.

Sure. If I'm overpaying to the tune of 3 FTE's salaries due to an overpriced vendor that's not very good, but I can rationalize it. I might even be able to make a story about productivity. It's not great but what's the opportunity cost of fixing it now?

If my traffic goes up by 10x and now I'm overpaying 30 FTE's worth of cash, I am going to have a hard time stomaching that fact, and now the opportunity cost situation is reversed. What could I do with another team?

While it's possible, even likely that Oracle might give Zoom a sweet deal, I think it's subtly different from what Quinn describes.

1. "AWS/GCP/Azure are price competitive with Oracle for this use case, but Oracle will give Zoom a better deal because they're trying to get business" is pretty boring. 2. "AWS/GCP/Azure overprice their bandwidth and Oracle doesn't" is interesting.

I don't think Azure needs a big client like this. I'm pretty sure Azure is just printing money for Microsoft now as it is. IIUC, newer AD deployments with Microsoft VM infrastructure automatically hybridize between local systems and Azure cloud, so there's basically a 1-click solution to deploying at Azure with a VPN instead of to local hardware you need to maintain and expand as needed, if there's even any local hardware at all and it's not AD deployed entirely in the cloud. I would say it's like if Amazon owned VMware, but that doesn't even quite encompass it, because many companies already have and need Active Directory environments so are already bought into the Microsoft ecosystem, and I'm not sure there's a combination of companies that actually compares to that. The closest might be Red Hat (maybe + VMware, but RH has virt offerings) + AWS, but that doesn't quite match either. Our company makes extensive use of CentOS but we also have a lot of Microsoft AD infrastructure we pay for.

I agree with Corey Quinn. This should be a wake-up call for the dominant players in this field. The high outbound bandwidth cost of AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud makes no sense in 2020. I hope this causes AWS and others to reduce their outbound bandwidth and inbound accelerated transfer cost to at least half or more after watching Zoom migrate to Oracle.

The cloud providers are optimized for the corporate datacenter use case: internal applications that talk to each other and employees. That stuff is harder to do with traditional web hosts, which are built around each server being exposed to the internet and until recently had no answer to VPC. The kinds of websites that could easily be hosted on the likes of Linode and DigitalOcean still ought to be.

>traditional web hosts, which are built around each server being exposed to the internet and until recently had no answer to VPC

This is absolutely wrong unless you have rank n00bz leading your technology. This isn't even touching the implication that anything is harder to do outside of cloud hosting providers, it's just accounting for, well, the entire industry prior to, oh, let's say 10 years ago. It's not as prehistoric as it sounds, and in many (if not most) cases, the cloud providers are just slapping new trademarkable names on those classic architecture choices.

Web hosts. There were of course other infrastructure providers that would support more complex architectures, but mostly of the “call us” variety.

That is a distinction without a difference for me here, but the people have spoken regardless.

Outbound fees also protect their computing business. They make it harder to take part of workloads to cheap providers such as Hetzner or OVH.

Perhaps they can offer something like "Commit to using AWS for the next 5-10 years and get 80% discount on outbound bandwidth". Something like that would make a lot of sense for startups like ours. We want to stay with AWS but the rising cost is making it really difficult to grow faster. If we grow fast, AWS gets more business from us, it's a win-win situation.

5-10 years is insanely long for a startup. Few startups even survive 10 years.

>The high outbound bandwidth cost of AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud makes no sense in 2020.

It makes sense when they have revenue targets to reach.

So the upshot is that they're barely using the database product and went with Oracle because they're much more competitive on bandwidth? I guess that makes sense. I wonder how stable that will be long term. Oracle probably has cheap bandwidth so you'll put down your first child on the database transaction costs, but if you're only using them for the bandwidth they'll probably won't be happy to let so much potential profit sit on the table.

In this case, they will be far more happy with the popularity associated with Zoom using them, much more than whatever money zoom will pay them. This gives their marketing/sales folks far more material than the money from Zoom can buy them.

I wouldn't count on Oracle as a whole, and especially individual Oracle sales managers that would benefit from turning the screws--- I wouldn't count on any of them to think all that long-term about things.

We're an outbound bandwidth heavy shop also and have been shopping Oracle cloud for the same reason. We've been told over and over that we don't spend enough with AWS to start seeing any discounts so to hell with it.

Have you considered IBM SoftLayer? That would be the more serious contender in my opinion if one doesn't want AWS/GCP.

Do you use Softlayer? If so how has your experience been to date?

All bandwidth isn't created equal, but I'd assume Oracle bandwidth won't be bottom tier.

It is still something to think about though when shopping providers, I assume any major cloud provider will have great peering, but a gigabit line from a random dedicated server provider will be noticeably slower for many customers.

Genuine question coming from a lack of understanding of building a many-to-many video chatting app.

Wouldn't you want to send the data peer-to-peer between the users rather than funneling everything through the Zoom server?

You'd get better latency, and you wouldn't have to pay for the network streaming costs...

Peer to peer has been dead for more than a decade. Computers are all behind firewall/NAT, they can't connect to one another. Mobiles are behind whatever is the mobile network nowadays, it's outbound only, nothing can connect in.

> Peer to peer has been dead for more than a decade.

Source? Some apps like bittorrent have increased in the past decade, have they not?

I shall say peer to peer in the context of legit software like video conference, not for downloading movies.

Peer to peer simply doesn't work since NAT. Skype used to be peer to peer but they backpedaled a while ago because this and more reasons that simply made p2p obsolete and broken.

It's too long to cover in one message. Would you be interested if I write a blog post? How peer to peer architecture became obsolete and why no software is using it.

I would read that blog post in a heartbeat.

If I am understanding the premise:

In a scenario of 12 people video chatting around the world, I don't believe you could guarantee consistent high-speed connections between the involved parties.

Making the connection is the hard part. The vast majority of computers and mobile devices basically do not have a routable/public IP address.

Teredo tunneling was one of the coolest solutions to this problem, providing both NAT-busting and IPv6 support but unfortunately it never gained popularity.

> Would you be interested if I write a blog post? How peer to peer architecture became obsolete and why no software is using it.

Ya, I'd be interested in reading that! Could you address why it wouldn't work with NAT the same way bittorrent deals with it? I'm probably missing something, but I don't see why bittorrent can work so easily but video conferencing cannot. thanks

Edit: Does bittorrent require you to port forward? I didn't think it did, but I haven't seen it configured in years so maybe I am forgetting that step

BitTorrent typically requires you to open a port on your router. For home use you just turn on UPnP but good luck getting that to work on a corp network.

Peer to peer may not work on the mobile networks you're on, but it works on many.

So how does bittorrent work, then?

Not quite true.

Some machines can't be reached. Many others have UPnP capable routers and can reconfigure NAT for port forwarding on the fly.

Additionally more and more users have IPv6 at home. It's now high enough to be worth trying along with other techniques like STUN.

I don't think that's always or even often practical given constraints such as: firewalls, NAT, and varying bandwidth limitations of clients.

In the best case, yes. In the worst case, users can't connect -- which goes in contrast with the "It Just Works" use case for Zoom.

P2P is great if you're small, but eventually it makes sense to do client-server with servers in the data centers to get that extra 10% of customers. Skype and Spotify are both formerly-P2P applications that went client-server.

In practice, you end up relaying a lot of traffic through TURN servers due to NAT issues, plus most enterprise-grade platforms connect to conferences as peers for recording purposes, and allow for server-sourced multicast for things like presentations with large audiences, or to allow synchronized video without lag or quality issues.

I'm sure Oracle will find ways to somehow screw their new cloud customers given enough time.

At first this sounds like a flippant bash against Oracle, but it may very well be worth considering carefully. Everything I've ever heard about Oracle makes me think the culture is about making the customer think they got a good deal and completely screwing them when the actual details come out, but by then there's the sunk-cost fallacy and the actual cost of migrating to a different solution working for them.

So, if that reputation is well earned, it's important to consider whether you'll actually come out ahead in the negotiations. One thing that's almost certain is that Oracle has a lot more experience in negotiating this particular form of contract (where one side tries to screw the other while still somehow retaining their business) than you or your company does.

Oracle laid me off in 2012, then Ellison bought a volcanic island. He truly is a Bond villain.

Oracle Cloud's outgoing transfer pricing ($0.0085/GB) is absolutely cheaper than top competitors (like Amazon EC2 US $0.05/GB for over 150TB/month). Could it be one of a reason?

These are list prices, and absolutely nowhere near the price large consumers pay. If you commit to a certain bandwidth per month for an extended period of time, it’s not difficult to get 80%-90% discount.

(I worked at a video delivery startup a few years back and these were exactly the type of discounts we would get)

Sounds like Amazon's margin is someone's opportunity.

Oracle's opportunity apparently!

Or anyone who can advertise lower outbound data costs.

Which is pretty much everyone else except GCP.

Why can't GCP advertise/provide lower outbound costs? Do they do something special with their networking that makes it substantially more expensive?

Beats me. They offer "Premium" (~0.12$/GB) and lately "Regular" (~0.8/GB) network tiers, and their interconnect service. I guess high cost of outbound networking helps locking in customers as well.

I can't help but think "so what" if they are list prices. That is how we should compare them is by list prices. If AWS, GCP, and others don't want to have their pricing appear to be exorbitant then they should adjust their list prices.

Also what percentage of their total customers are not paying list price? Is it more than 10%, 20%, 30%? I know that me as an individual I will be paying list prices.

And the problem with not comparing list prices is that of course you can have two or more companies getting discounts with the exact same bandwidth who will be paying vastly different rates.

Do not compare on list prices for large companies like that. Comparing on list prices is a huge mistake from developers (and young folks new to running a company), because developers hate sales and negotiating and talking to people. Everything above some volume has to be negotiated with suppliers.

In a video company doing 1 000 000 TB of transfer per month, you gotta negotiate with every provider for bandwidth, that's just the way it is.

Just like if you were working for a plane company, you wouldn't be buying fuel from the station down the street.

I think the point of bringing this up is the price ratio between the services. If you get 80-90% off both, Oracle is still ahead.

AWS would have to offer an 83% discount just to match Oracle's list price. At an 80% discount Oracle doesn't even have to lift a finger.

OTOH, the absolute numbers matter. If it's $1,000K/yr for AWS, that's $100K/yr for Oracle. That could be a deciding factor - $900M difference

OTOH, if you are getting 90% off the list on both, you're talking $100M vs $10M. That's enough where features, SLA, QoS, matters more ($90M).

Not sure I agree with your examples but I think I get your gist.

Saving a little might not be worth the labor costs and risk differences between two solutions. Paying a bit more to contract out a class of problem could be the thing to do.

Though probably not in Zoom's particular case. If this were Patagonia, or Home Depot, sure. Pay someone else's IT nerds to deal with the problem. But Zoom is IT through and through. They better understand the low level details of how their stuff works, or when they get into trouble they won't even see it coming, and we will wonder very loudly why not.

I have been purview to negotiations of very large deals with both GCP and AWS. Both would heavily discount compute ( to the tune of 75% ) but barely discount transfer. Since transfer grows directly with popularity and can rarely be optimized apart from moving it away from GCP and AWS and compute does not, the compute discounts on a large scale are trivial compared to getting taking to the cleaners on transfer.

At AWS you got an 80% discount on transfer? My eyebrows rose to the roof, I'm not convinced this is true. Which specific cloud provider were you dealing with? Without going into more details due to NDAs, the few things I've looked at were nowhere near that, specially for transfer.

>Oracle Cloud's outgoing transfer pricing ($0.0085/GB)

Wow. This is even cheaper than the Linode / DO / Vultr / UpCloud $0.01/GB.

>Based on Ellison’s video endorsement of Zoom, Oracle the company appears to be using Zoom wall-to-wall, instead of dog-fooding any internal product under development.

Such endorsement usually precedes acquisition.

Would that make Zoom's Oracle fees go up or down?

it means soon you won't be able to use Zoom internally unless you have a 32 CPU license and PeopleSoft. /s

Only audio will be available in the community license. If you click on the video button, of course it will start the video, but since it is an enterprise feature, you'll get an audit notice and an invoice for a bajillion dollars in the mail. /s

whatever accounting says saves more taxes

Considering that at least Google is a direct competitor, and Amazon is very aggressive at stealing ideas from their partners, I think choosing an alternative like Oracle makes sense simply from a business ecosystem and competition perspective.

True, Oracle is so old and docile that they'd never attempt a competitor

Oracle entering a consumer market would be great way to screw themselves. One can dream.

Plus, Oracle will end up acquiring them, it’s unlikely that Zoom will last as a long term standalone business.

Zoom market cap 38.24B (70% more than Twitter), Oracle market cap 167.05B. Can’t last as a long term standalone business and has to be acquired by Oracle? Sounds like a pretty baseless claim.

Won't =/= Can't i.e. they may been seen as an attractive acquisition

Oracle has that much cash on hand, and the market cap is inflated by the COVID outbreak. That market cap could be $10B in a week.

Assuming that valuation will stay in place in the economic disaster that we find ourselves is a big leap.

Where are they going to pivot to?

Zoom is profitable, so I do not see why.

Amazon has a direct competitor already:

https://aws.amazon.com/chime

I thought this might be the case, I haven't used chime and didn't really research into Amazon's messaging capabilities.

>Amazon is very aggressive at stealing ideas from their partners

Are there some examples of this?

edit - this is somewhat related, from another comment in this thread: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-40367626

I think Amazon as a company has earned a bad faith reading into all of their business ventures by bullying small sellers on their own platform by directly competing with them and using sales data to beat them in their own niche.

I'm sure there is much less evidence of this at the cloud/enterprise level.

>Google is a direct competitor

I think that people over estimate potential damages of being your competitors customer. Google is not going anywhere, with or without this contract, and if they want to make an investment in video conferencing, they already have more than enough capital & resources to do that.

Staying away from GCP purely because it is under google would be a crazy decision

As of April 29, Google Meet is now free, which is seemingly direct competition to Zoom, especially with the emphasis on security.

https://blog.google/products/meet/bringing-google-meet-to-mo...

Opinion my own not Google's.

First, Google Meet is also not e2e encrypted. Second, Google Meet is not now free. They're rolling it out over several weeks. My account isn't activated yet. Is yours?

Google is really, really late to game here. What was Google doing for the last 2 months while Zoom capitalized on our situation?

Google Meet is "free" for 60 minutes, which conveniently enough won't be enforced until September.

That's just a shady deal, especially if they end up trying to retire Hangouts chat and so normal users can no longer use free video / voice call services that they've come to rely on having for like 10+ years now.

Don't get me wrong - I love Meet on my business accounts and along with all the other Apps in G Suite, it is well worth paying for. But I also value the fact that normal ass standard Google users have been able to have access to a semi-decent video and voice conferencing platform for over a decade now. I hope that doesn't change come September.

Even for free I won't use it. I already have solutions that I (and the business I work for) have been using for several months. (Personal: Skype or Zoom; Business: MS Teams) Those solutions work. Not only do I not assume that the Google solution won't be half-assed, I also do not assume that it will remain free, nor even remain in their product line for any reasonable length of time for that matter. In fact, being "free" makes even more leery that Google will axe it down the road.

Regardless, if I (and I assume many beside myself) need a video conferencing solution, I would have found one by now and no longer need a "me, too" product.

Walmart doesn't host in AWS for exactly this reason. Amazon is famous for stealing whatever data they can get to promote their own business over their customers.

Some might consider Zoom giving Google, Amazon, or Microsoft insights into their business as the crazy decision.

Are we giving FB a pass for stealing competitor ideas? IG stories (from Snap), FB Room - Zoom Clone, etc.

In my view, those are not the same. If you have a product that I like and then I subsequently copy it then that's one thing. You store your data with me and then I use your data to give my product a competitive advantage over yours is completely different.

How so? Different in what sense?

Ideas are not protected under law. There's no "stealing" of ideas.

You can steal data, code, and customer lists.

The comparison is misplaced. Google is not in Zoom business. Google barely happens to have a third grade product for video call, sold as part of their business tools package. The Google product has been shut down and renamed like 5 times since it was created and people don't even take it seriously.

Amazon and Walmart are selling the exact same products, they're competing head to head for every sale trying to get the customer to not shop on the other.

They recently reported 100 million daily active users and growing by 3 million a day.

I think people are taking it seriously.

> Walmart doesn't host in AWS for exactly this reason.

This isn't strictly the case. They do push some of their data to other SaaS providers hosted on AWS.

Heard of Chime? It's been there for years.

Half garbage, half true. I think what the author forgot to say, which is really important is, zoom tested their workload on various paas platforms, and they liked oracle's price performance ratio. Also Oracle is so laser focused on big new logos, like Zoom or Slack. The author is obviously an outsider.

Going with Oracle however you want to paint it is not going to end well.

There are hundreds of cases to prove it.

They already are using AWS and Azure, it's not that they are moving away from that.

Zoom probably benefits heavily from access to the lobbyists and lawyers which form oracle’s core product offering.

The article misses the Amazon competitive problem. Quite a few retail companies will not do business with companies that host on AWS infrastructure (e.g. Walmart).

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-40367626

EDIT: I misread the parent; it refers to retailers not using tools like Zoom because they run on AWS.

Original comment:

You mean like this part of the article?

If you deliver a product on top of a third party cloud platform, that cloud can see all the telemetry data. Such access becomes problematic when that same cloud platform offers a competing product, which is why no big retailer would ever run their e-commerce operation on AWS.

The parent is referring to a second order issue. Your quote talks about how competing companies don't want to use AWS for their own products because it would reveal traffic numbers and telemetry and Amazon could potentially later release a competing product. Parent is talking about how zoom's customers won't want to use zoom because they don't trust their corporate communications to be trunked over amazon.

I reread the comment and you are absolutely correct. I've added an edit.

I work at an enterprise SaaS product in the logistics space, and this is 100% a concern. A recent project had endless discussions about whether we could put it in AWS, or if whether customers would refuse to use it if that happened.

That said, it was still an AWS/Azure/GCP discussion.

The title should say Oracle cloud, otherwise it reads as the Oracle database.

Wow, conspiracies everywhere. Oracle has switched their provider from Cisco WebEx to Zoom and the transition seems to have been very smooth. I don’t hear their employees complaining about it, they seem to like it.

I think it is just reciprocal business. It isn’t as though zoom will switch Google, Amazon or Microsoft.

"The deeper strategic consideration, I think, is Zoom’s concern with AWS and Azure accessing its telemetry. "

This is really messed up.

If there is a 'real risk' AWS is reading your data on S3 ... then how on earth does their business survive?

80% of businesses are dealing with sensitive data.

Quote: "...more business with the U.S. government is the best “disinfectant” to the FUD around its connection with China."

This cracked me up so hard that I've woken my wife and kids (it's ~3AM for me).

I think it's a shame Oracle doesn't offer SPARC instances in their cloud.

Are they still competitive in performance against POWER9?

From Wikipedia:

> As of September 2017, the latest commercial high-end SPARC processors are Fujitsu's SPARC64 XII (introduced in 2017 for its SPARC M12 server) and Oracle's SPARC M8 introduced in September 2017 for its high-end servers.

> On Friday, September 1, 2017, after a round of layoffs that started in Oracle Labs in November 2016, Oracle terminated SPARC design after the completion of the M8. Much of the processor core development group in Austin, Texas, was dismissed, as were the teams in Santa Clara, California, and Burlington, Massachusetts. SPARC development continues with Fujitsu returning to the role of leading provider of SPARC servers, with a new CPU due in the 2020 time frame.

I don't think SPARC machines have been competitive in terms of (price / performance) or even just raw (performance / development time) in a long, long, long time. I imagine most of the market for SPARC machines are legacy customers who are continuing to build and maintain older codebases that have been running for a long time.

---

POWER9 machines are pretty neat, but IIRC they compete somewhat with contemporary Xeons, which is to say that the difficulty / cost of obtaining said POWER9 system and developing optimized software for it is going to be a good bit higher, because IBM hasn't opened up that ecosystem enough and still prices those machines at remarkably high prices (so there's not a meaningful incentive for anyone to try bridging over to it as a new platform, with the exception of hyperscalers like Google who use it as a constant threat to negotiate prices with the like of Intel etc).

In the case of POWER, the scenario where they are clear winners is the scale up one. This is a scenario you usually don't want to be in.

Reads like oracle needed discounted licenses in exchange for a presser about adding some infrastructure to oracles cloud

Looking forward to the update from Zoom in about 18 months -- "Why we switched from Oracle"

This explains so much...

it’s all downhill from here.

Partly because Ellison is a big-time Trump supporter, maybe? A path to avoiding both legitimate and illegitimate/scape-goating inquiries from the administration.

Partly because Ellison is a big-time Trump supporter, maybe? A path to avoiding both legitimate and illegitimate/scape-goating federal inquiries

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