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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Who actually buys Oracle? Apart from Java, don't tech companies avoid Oracle like the plague?

Are they selling the MBAs at Fortune 500s? And is that how IBM stays afloat as well?

This is the HN bubble speaking. "Tech companies" represent a very small fraction of the economy, and even a very small fraction of companies that have programmers who write code and need databases.

And that's before we get into the fact that Oracle is not just a database company. They have a bunch of other products targeted at many different industries and applications, such as project management, ERP, procurement, etc.

Oracle wants to be the one-stop shop for technology needed by any of the many, many legacy industries that aren't tech, and in many industries they succeed at that.

It's really amazing to watch, plus the delusion that it's ctos being tricked or something.

take Opera. You buy it to run eg an amusement park or a casino or chain of hotels. That's a relatively complex thing to do, and not something that amusement parks or hotels are capable of building out a team of devs to build themselves.

The list of things that are table stakes would run $10-$20m of devtime for a decade to build out. Bookings (both individual, block for events, and syncs w/ expedia or others) / payments / loyalty + customer relationship management / etc.

One major factor are kickbacks.

If you are working in a government or in a large company that can be the main factor for decision.

https://investopedia.com/terms/k/kickback.asp

The other one, is legacy systems.

If you are a big bank, migrating away is a big risk, and anyway you make so much profit that it’s better to leave an extra 10M USD license fees in costs untouched, rather than risk destroying the 300M USD in profit.

(Add that to the risk that your CTO may get mad because he won’t get his kickback)

Also, "nobody ever got fired for choosing Oracle"

Every F500 company with historical Oracle installations built before the open source offerings were actually competitive. Even if every one of those decided today they were going to ditch Oracle, you are talking about multi-year initiatives.

Oracle has a ton of Line of Business software embedded into companies and migration is too massive to even consider so it remains. Peoplesoft, Siebel CRM and EBiz are huge.

There is also plenty of 3rd party LoB software that requires Oracle databases as well.

Also, yea, there is still plenty of companies onboarding Oracle Products, usually due to some new exec they hired who used it at last company and swears that it will revolutionize their business.

Lots of people hate Oracle with a passion and will not use it for anything new. However, their existing production databases already use it and migration could take years and there is a lot of risk in doing that. As a result, they'll be profitable for years to come.

My company has a bunch of Oracle databases. It's a large bank so I assume they are paying a lot. I don't know why Oracle was chosen in the first place, but it surely wasn't by people who were very passionate about databases or open source or even tech. It's something that works and as long as it works they are not going to ditch it. Whatever it costs, it's not very much in the big scale of things.

Oracle tracks over five billion individuals worldwide through its data aggregation and de-anonymization services. All that "anonymized" data your "free" (and not-free) services collects on you for resale: one of Oracle's businesses is correlating that data together from many sources and sell that correlation. So rest assured the anonymized data your pot shop and bank are selling to brokers is definitely getting worked backwards to update and maintain your shadow profile.

These companies are selling finished products to other companies. Think ERP. SAP sells one too, and so does Microsoft I think. Oracle’s I assume uses oracle db, which will require separate licenses and support. So by the time Oracle cranks up the price lever, the business is too deep to get out. When you see these ads about “how they enable businesses” or how “they empower dreams” this is because what they sell is so unspecialized that they can’t really explain what it is they sell. They sell mostly crud software with forms connected through custom workflow engines that are templated for different industries, all on top of their core technologies (for licenses) and with integrations to almost every system know to man. Because if they do not have one, they will bill the next customer to build it.

When they talk to actual tech companies, they probably laugh when we can’t figure out what they actually do. We’re children playing with Postgres and node apps while they’re owning entire markets every quarter.

Took me a while to realize this, but the need they serve is just that people want their businesses to work, including complying with all laws, do payroll, keep customer lists updated, send documents to the CEO for approval, order supplies from China and produce financial reports. Every business with a decent size will need that, so Salesforce, Oracle, IBM, SAP, Microsoft and friends, with help from McKinsey, Accenture & Co pick up the slack, with kickbacks all around.

Their finance/accounting products are sold to finance executives. They conveniently downplay the fact that you will have to use third-party application or build your own if you want to interact with that data in a way that is remotely intuitive, as all of the stock tools they provide are absolute trash.

Isn't database their most selling product?

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