Oracle Consulting Rate Card
cio.ny.gov
cio.ny.gov
I sell a white label version of one of my products (Twiddla), with an API for integrating it into your site. From time to time I field requests from people who want to build their thing on top of our platform, asking if we do consulting.
I tell them yes, then quote what it would take to build what they want and 90% of them have a heart attack on the spot.
"But we have this quote from another developer saying he can do the whole thing for $1,500!"
I don't doubt it. But then I suspect his dev didn't build Twiddla. I did, so I charge accordingly. I recommend having your own team do your integration since really it's quite straightforward, but if you really need it to work right and you need it fast, you can go straight to the source (but it'll cost you.)
It's the same thing with Oracle. Sure you can find a guy to build your thing for $25/hr, and chances are he'll probably even do a good job. But if you want to remove all the "probably's" from that sentence you can pay 10x as much and have Oracle do it for you.
It looks like you're assuming that the guys Oracle sends out to do the job are true domain experts, and that's a giant leap of faith.
If you hire an incompetent, it's your fault. If you hire Oracle and they send you an incompetent, it's theirs. Good luck with getting the money back though.
But yeah, nobody gets fired for hiring Oracle consultants.
If you do hire one, make sure you have a maintenance agreement with them so they can't just set it and forget it leaving you with a big bill and problems.
Just my experience.
Edit: I've never used an Oracle consultant. My comment is meant at technical consultants in general.
There's pitfalls on both sides, but I've had people not give me information for 3 weeks, fiddling with other projects, then get upset, after our initial agreed on engagement timeframe is done, when they can't just have me stay involved for another month.
I've said before, and I'll say it again - almost all projects I've been involved with that failed or were extremely bad projects (consultant or employee or whatever) failed because of communication issues, not technical issues. Even when tech issues arise, there needs to be competent communication about the impact. Good communication - from all parties - is key. It's just that with full time employees I think many managers prefer to let things slide around longer.
http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/gsa-pricelist-070...
Which means that's the cheapest rate Oracle is allowed to give. By law.
hourly rates are one thing, but unless they've got reasonable time frames for building stuff, it doesn't really matter.
I typically charge 3-5x what 'regular' web developers do, and I catch flak for that from some potential clients. I also tend to get stuff done 5-10x faster than many other 'regular' web developers too, so I don't have any issues justifying myself. The people that care about hourly rates move on, the people that care about getting their problem solved quickly stay.
I imagine Oracle's got 'standard' implementation timelines for common scenarios.
[1] http://blog.asmartbear.com/consulting-company-accounting.htmlIf that number is right, the customer is paying 25% for the work, 25% for the overhead of the consulting company, and 50% for the Oracle brand.
Going up to $484/hr as I read it, seems out of the ballpark to me reasonability-wise. I'm sure they do a good job, but just like a lawyer that might charge that rate, high rates don't mean mistakes are never made.
I'm pretty sure if I wanted to get a primary contributor to any open source database software to consult on a project, it would be far far less, and they'd know it just as well (if not better) than an Oracle consultant knows Oracle. I'm guessing the majority of these consultants don't touch the core code of the product that often.
I guess I still haven't been properly explained the real value of Oracle yet. We use it at my dayjob, and every time I have to deal with it I am frustrated. Its so expensive, but why again is this significantly better than PostgreSQL?
But then I find that companies with huge datasets like Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, etc... don't use it. And I go back to scratching my head.
The other good reason is that Oracle hires some of the very best sales people in the world, and nobody is selling postgres, mySQL, etc to the same extent. There's a huge difference between being a 'technically better' product and being able to convince a PHB of that. Also, Oracle tends to support damn near everything, and damn near everything (Enterprisey) supports Oracle.
It's the 'safe' choice if you can afford it.
To mimic MySQL's "SELECT last_name FROM employees LIMIT 50,50" you have to do something like this:
SELECT last_name FROM (SELECT last_name, ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY last_name) R FROM employees) WHERE R BETWEEN 51 and 100;
Aside from that, it's general operational differences and variations from the SQL spec on a pretty grand scale. The flip side to that though is that most serious Enterprise companies are generally using Oracle already anyway, so it's safe to target Oracle or MS-SQL and know that almost all of your customers will have one or both.
Oracle at Facebook: http://venturebeat.com/2010/12/08/tim-campos-dreamforce-comm...
Correct me if I'm wrong, Amazon (the retail online store) was using Oracle in the past. I don't know what DB they're using now.
Ditto with eBay.
Of course you could. But there's a bit of a fallacy w/r/t hiring consultants, if you hire someone directly (ie not through a company or agency) you can expect to pay about half of what you'd pay for the same person through an agency . The benefits of going through Oracle (as stated above) is if your consultant disappears you have another a phone call away, and because "no one ever got fired for buying IBM". However you pay for this privilege.
I suck at charging people money for hourly work.
edit: Fresh example from /newest list: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3190866
Then, it looks like its uploading pdf to Scribd or looking for Scribd copy of a posted pdf ...or does something completely different.
http://www.scribd.com/vacuum? sure sounds mystic.
Anyway, not much to discuss.
That's actually pretty cheap.
I know quite a few senior (ish) consultants in Oracle who were billed at 3x this.
It makes sense that they give the feds a different rate though - I would assume federal contracts last much longer than a lay customer (3x longer?).
That said, I doubt that this is far out of date, or far off the mark for what they charge as standard consulting fees based on recent work with both parties.
As you pointed out too, this contract was for 10 years, so there was probably a discount built in as part of a competitive bid.
I used to be a consultant working for a contractor for Sun (all big names in consulting do this, however. saves their hr costs) and Sun charged the customer about what you see on that card; the company I was working for, however, would end up getting about or less than half of that.
All Sun was actually doing was providing a "project manager" I never saw and I didn't get remotely the kind of information and access to information that actual Sun techs would get and have. So ultimately they just sold their "good name" and passed on the work and kept the lion's share and when one of the projects went south (nobody effectively got the customer under control), they made sure all their contracts were water-tight and passed all the blame right down to us and we had to pay them back.
Consulting is dirty, dirty business and you'll be swimming with sharks much, much bigger than you when working for the average small, highly effective and flexible IT company. And yes, you will sell your soul more often than you shall like.