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Comment by chris_wot | Hacker News Reader

One wonders how long it will take for Oracle to become largely irrelevant.

Oracle has made substantial push into the hyperscale cloud space in the last 2 years. Even though they lag quite a bit behind AWS/Azure/GCP, they are far from irrelevant. (Revenue grew approximately 26% year over year in 2019) While Oracle DB is still dominant (At the end of 2019, Oracle was the leader in DBMS revenue ($15.15 billion) and market share (27.5%)) in large enterprises, Oracle will retain a place in the industry. (430,000 customers in 175 countries and revenue of $39 billion for fiscal year 2020)

Not contesting the facts, but important to read them in context.

Market share by revenue is likely biased towards Oracle vs market share by usage/installs. I’m under the impression that those migrating towards other DBMS’s are partly doing so to get away from the high pricing of Oracle. So even if usage of eg RDS Aurora and Oracle are the same, it would show Oracle as doing really well. If I’m correct, and the underlying user base for Oracle is declining, then their numbers can only go down in the long term.

But, they have a great money printing machine today, loads of enterprise sales expertise, and the buffers (read: time) to deal with this change. So, although I don’t think they’ll become irrelevant, I wouldn’t say they’re doing particularly well either (from a trends and market direction perspective)

Larry Ellison started the Oracle ball rolling by selling an up-and-coming database technology, based on relationships, which was an R&D study at Stanford? (IIRC) to the FBI. I presume that Oracle powers all the "signals" gathering at the NSA/CIA/FBI. That alone would be enough to keep Oracle in business forever.

There were no Oracle databases in the Snowden revelations, all MySQL iirc.

Oracle owns MySQL, though.

Sure, but the division between Oracle Database and MySQL Database is pretty large; that being said I wouldnt be surprised if they had somehow gotten some money out of it.

Don't forget that Java is an Oracle product too and it's still in the top 3 seat for languages used whether HN likes it or not. Oracle isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

Java was a Sun product, but that didn't keep Sun alive

It's still an Oracle product now and Oracle has done a lot of good for Java.

You would think, but the stock price is still going up and they have a lot of cash on hand. I don't really understand why anyone does business with them, but they are likely to be around for a long time.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ORCL?p=ORCL

They are probably going to last really long considering the impact they made before FAANG took off. Many of their customers are governments and quasi-government companies (think bank and telecom) so I actually think they are going to last a lot longer than we want.

I wonder at what point anyone will be willing to work for them and at what salary, though.

Surely there comes a point where even paying triple the standard rate, you can't get more engineers working on dusty old code while remaining profitable and their customers' best offer.

Golden time for retired contractors. The same you see for the COBOL generation.

>>why anyone does business with them, but they are likely to be around for a long time

The answer is partially in the question.

For large enterprises where large part of IT is a strict cost centre - the "boring" areas of HR/Pay, Financials, CRM, ERM, SCM, etc - predictability, support, longevity, reliability are far more important than sexiness, new technologies, or even immediate cost of license compared to cost of change and uncertainty.

And most Oracle "customers" probably arent interacting with Oracle directly. They are buying a financial system or erp from a vendor who is Oracle under the hood. They might get to the product selection stage and be looking at 3 industry specific products built on Oracle vs NetSuite. Either way Oracle wins.

> predictability, support, longevity, reliability

You can get all of those with postgres too.

I mean, yes and no. "No", for the purposes of many traditional non-IT large enterprises.

CIO of large company sees value in having "one neck to choke" for their HR Application, Proxy Server, Web Server, App Server, Database Server, Enterprise Service Bus, Search Engine, Monitoring Software, etc. A simple licensing and support model with streamlined contract model as opposed to 27 bespoke contracts with "never heard of them" consulting/support companies for each level of the open-source stack which "nobody owns" (https://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_support/nort...).

At ground level, we may not see value in the same way; we may complain and moan about it; about vendor lock-in, license cost, slow pace, etc etc etc. I certainly did, for decades :).

Longevity, ditto: https://www.postgresql.org/support/versioning/

https://www.oracle.com/us/support/library/lsp-tech-chart-069...

They've certainly started getting flat in revenue:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ORCL/oracle/revenu...

My guess is they will hang on for a long time as the reigning king of on-prem. They aren't hurting yet, because the companies that are losing ground in on-prem are losing it both to AWS/Azure, but also losing the on-prem ground to Oracle. Eventually, the continued downward spiral of on-prem will hit them. But on-prem really never goes away. Oracle will just become the king of a much smaller hill.

well, they need to move to the cloud fast

but they are already kind of there, they own NetSuite which is the number 1 cloud ERP

they also own Oracle ERP which is another top 5 cloud ERP

they own peoplesoft/jd edwards and all their clients

they next to SAP, own the enterprise apps market and unlike SAP, they seem to be serious about competing with AWS ans Azure, Oracle OCI, see to get niece reviews

So how long will it take for Oracle to be irrelevant, if OCI and NetSuite continue to move in the right directions, for as long as people have money

They have a cloud offering

Seems the Oracle PR department found HN :)

It’s at least noticeable, what do they even make anymore that’s valuable? DB software, Java?

GraalVM

https://www.statista.com/statistics/269728/oracles-revenue-b...

Cloud services and license support is the top bucket, unclear what all the entails.

They own a LOT of business oriented very pricey software (Netsuite etc)...

virtualbox

They are a strong name in Enterprise Resource Planning software, both internally developed and acquired. Besides licenses, they do a lot of ERP hosting, likely recognized as "Cloud" revenue.

(Disclaimer/Source - I've been a PeopleSoft admin/architect/ops working for IBM for 20 years; PeopleSoft was bought by Oracle in 2005; all opinions my own etc:)

They made other plays - there is Oracle Linux as rebrand of RHEL; a few rebranded/purchased virtualization as well as hardware products; etc etc

They are pivoting their enterprise db and server (sun) business into a cloud services business. Oracle solutions require a ton of infrastructure to run properly at scale and they are using that to pitch their own cloud. I wonder how long it'll be before they start building moats to defend against "bare metal" solutions from other providers.

Enterprise market is a nice place to be and they are firmly entrenched

like IBM irrelevant?

still generating revenue but not seen as influential within tech.

Oracle is relevant outside of a courthouse?

As long as RDBMS and Java are around they will be.

And the information revolution is just beginning for most of the 4 billion citizens on the planet.

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