Aren’t contract expiration dates distributed over time? Why would now be a particularly vulnerable time? Granted, we’re coming up on the end of the calendar year, but 2025 doesn’t feel particularly special.
E.g. you're an IT admin at Big Co overseeing software contracts. You can often get interesting insights by looking at things like how aggressive their sales reps are with end of quarter discounts (how desperate are they to meet numbers that quarter?). Or if you see a company completely dropping the ball within your org, but on CNBC you constantly hear how great the company is by pundits and analysts -- maybe you know something the pundits don't.
Often times the consensus view of a stock trails reality by a few weeks to a month - there's a lot of non-public but also non-confidential information that isn't readily available to analysts, but exposed to employees of customers/vendors/partners/end-users.
TLDR: when stock picking or day trading, pick companies within the niche of the world where you're a SME.
The example that my business school professor gave was that if you’re riding in an elevator with two executives and they talk about how they’re going to miss numbers and trade it’s not insider. If one of them tells you specifically, it is.
That's why I always shout my inside information within earshot of my financial adviser but never actually place any trades myself.
It takes companies 3-5 years for migration of these products, all of which are not CapEx funded and so get minimal resourcing without prioritisation by leadership.
The vendor isn't incentivized to fuck you over on renewal pricing as soon as the implementation is complete.
And because of the size of the contract, the customer has more leverage at renewal time.
TL;DR - these 10 year enterprise deals with Oracle allowed companies to save money in the short run and get predictable annual licensing fees. It also bought them time to get more of their application portfolio off of Oracle so when it comes time to re-up they'll negotiate those fees down.