Oracle slammed on support fees, again
Just when you thought that the Oracle bashing would quiet down a bit after their impressive quarterly results, Information Week came out with a great blog that puts Oracle’s financial success in perspective. According to author Bob Evans, VP and director of the publication’s Global CIO Unit, who wrote a piece in the July 6th issue of the magazine, the number don’t quite add up – Oracle 22% maintenance fees, 51% operting margins and up to 10 years until Oracle offers non-traditional models to customers. Simply put, there’s not enough value for what they’re charging customers.
For those of you who read the abridged printed version, you missed out on a set of five hard-hitting questions that Evans asks, that I’ve paraphrased here:
1) Will Oracle be able to continue to deliver value and innovation to its customers that is worth the 22% annual maintenance fees?
2) Has Oracle limited customers to few software delivery options without delivering full value for the prices they charge?
3) Will Oracle’s self-confessed decade-long evolution toward more-diversified offerings be too late to match the needs of customers looking to lower infrastructure costs and transform businesses and IT operations in the near term?
4) If customers chafe as they gain greater understanding of Oracle’s business model, will Oracle reconfigure its up-front “price” and annual fees to more accurately present a value-for-value exchange for customers?
5) In the new and different economic reality, will customers be willing to do business as usual with Oracle, when in fact the global recession has forced almost every other IT vendor/partner to alter long-standing terms and conditions?
Given the marketplace, the offerings from competitive vendors and the dynamics of the IT industry, Evans has, in essense, created a gut check for every Oracle customer. He asks them to “take a long, hard look at the fundamental building blocks of Oracle’s business model…because you’ll see that the cornerstone — the piece on which everything else sits and everything else depends — has become the annual maintenance fees that you pay to Oracle.”
Break Free from high database costs
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SQL server embarrasses Microsoft at Windows Launch
If Microsoft was trying to reinforce the perception that SQL Server does not scale, they did a bang up job of it during the public release of Windows 7 on their MSDN web site today. According to Ed Bott’s Microsoft report on ZDNet, “the glitch was caused by a SQL Server database that reached excessive fragmentation levels because of the tremendous surge of queries. How massive was the demand surge? The number of requests to the MSDN and TechNet databases in less than an hour was equal to more than a week’s traffic under normal circumstances.”
You’d think that by now the good folks over at Microsoft would have been able to estimate incoming traffic for a new Windows release. Maybe that’s why some are calling this the ultimate marketing gig – botch your database on purpose; create buzz for your new OS release and let your database’s rep take a hit. The argument actually holds water coz there’s really not much lower SQL Server can go in its notoriety for poor scalability. The truant database in question is not even Kilimanjaro - the upcoming release of SQL Server - who knows what heights (or depths) MS will scale when it launches later this year.
The piece I loved most about the Bott report was this graph from an “internal Microsoft document” that plots the CPU usage of SQL Server during the hour or so this morning before the fixed the isssue, most likely by throwing more processors or memory at it.
SQL Server CPU Usage During Meltdown (Image courtesy: ZDNet)
What was really amusing was that the graph could so easily represent CPU hogging of *ANY* Microsoft product! Got to give them credit for consistency.
Take Action Now to Lower Your Database Cost
CIO’s around the world regularly cite database costs in their top three IT budget killers. Learn from real life customers how IBM has dramatically reduced the TCO and TCA of data with ground breaking innovations and optimizations built right into the heart of their databases.
Register for a FREE webcast that will help you learn how you can get more bang for your buck from existing hardware, eliminate mundane and costly database administration tasks, dramatically lower your storage costs, and slash database support and maintenance costs.
Details:
Date: Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Time: 9:00 AM ET/6:00 AM PT AND 2:00 PM ET/11:00 AM PT
Speakers:
Conor O’Mahony, Program Director, DB2 Product Marketing
Robert Donaldson, Database Architect, LSSiData
Leroy Hill, Manager of EDW Engineering, Fiserv
Quick – When you think Coca Cola, what pops into your head?
Find out if millions of other users thought of the same word that you did. (I thought of “red” – kinda dumb I know – surprisingly, it was higher on the list that I imagined). Click here for Coke’s brand perception tag cloud.
Brand ranking has been around a while. We now have Brand Tagging – a unique way to figure out what associations your audience might be making when they see your logo, company name or merchandise. I see a lot of value in rectifying the negative or undesirable associations your audience might be making, which may be a bigger deterrent to sales than any other factor. Similarly, it’s worth understanding what positive connections have worked in your favor and re0inforcing those further in your messaging and brnading tactics going forward.
Noah Brier, strategy lead at the Barbarian Group, is one of the brightest minds of our generation. He’s put together, among other web sites, a brand tagging site where you can not only tag brands yourself, but also view tags for your brand.
Then there’s the reverse brand lookup game – you have to guess the brand from the tags presented to you. When presented ScotchGuard, I typed in “tape”, only to realize right after I hit Enter that it’s the fabric protector not the scotch tape, also made by 3M. Interestingly enough, tape was by far the most popular response to ScotchGuard! Let me know if you come across some interesting ones. Have Fun!
After Deep Blue Success, IBM moves to Jeopardy with Watson
If you’re interested in the business implications of this announcement, check out “How IBM Plans to Destroy Google”.
IBM Announces Game Changing Database and Warehouse – DB2 9.7 & InfoSphere Warehouse 9.7
IBM today announced the latest release of their database and data warehouse – DB2 9.7 and InfoSphere Warehouse 9.7 – two huge innovations that will change the way the industry operates. Code-named “Cobra,” DB2 9.7 can save customers up to 75% on storage – more than any competitor. In addition, this is the industry’s first database software to deliver business analytics for relational and XML data simultaneously.
If you are an Oracle or Microsoft database customer, what does this mean to you?
1. You can do a little jig because now you have a very cost effective option that gives you top level performance, high availability and development productivity. The proverbial “best of both worlds” option.
2. Just like with the cable company, this is the right time to question charges on your database bill. Ask your vendor why you’re paying through the nose for features that IBM offers for much less, or in some cases, for free. Compare apples to apples and you’ll see that DB2 can save you a bundle on administration, storage and development costs. Plus there are new features to make your migration painless, less risky and less expensive.
3. If you have a mandate to go green, you now have a solid proof point to show that your database is green. DB2 9.7, the greenest database in the industry, can save you on server costs, electricity and floor space, reducing the carbon footprint of your data. It’s no coincidence that DB2 9.7 was announced on Earth Day.
4. When comparing costs, don’t forget to add database administration and development costs, and the cost to hire, update and retain skills. DB2 9.7 packs in many hands-free administration features (including self optimization, self tuning and self healing) that let your DBA’s work on stuff that’s really important. There are also a ton of pureXML and data type enhancements for developers, further reducing development time and cost.
Read what customers and business partners are saying about DB2 9.7. Better yet, join the Early Access program and try the code yourself or join the free web cast to get your questions answered.
If you find yourself trapped in a bad marriage with your database vendor, it’s time to break free of low value, expensive maintenance contracts and opportunistic pricing. Find out more at ibm.com/breakfree.
ps: I don’t usually talk about gadgets and features because what really matters is business benefits to end customes, but here’s a few highlights for the tech savvy:
- Indexes, XML data and LOB’s can be compressed in DB2 9.7
- XML is now in the warehouse! In addition, XML data is now fully supported by DPF
- Cubing Services are now integrated with Cognos, BOBJ, MS Office and more
- Python and Linux Workload Management are supported by DB2 9.7
Attend the free web cast on May 6 @ 11:30EST, to learn more or ask questions from the architects behind the products. Click here to register.
Oh Larry, seriously?
In typical Ellison style, Oracle made an over-priced bid for Sun today, that has red herring written all over it. Not only does this decision, borne more out of the McNealy-Ellison long time affair, have nothing to with Oracle’s long term strategy, it also stinks of deceit. Call it sour grapes but one gets the feeling that Sun had its heart set on Oracle well before IBM popped the question. Was it really the 10 cents/share difference between the Oracle and IBM bids that turned the Sun board unanimously in favor of Oracle, or did it have to do with two megalomaniacs thinking alike. The likes of Safra Katz and John Schwartz (who, incidently had nothing to say on his blog – sign of things to come?) – senior players on both sides – probably had very little say in the deal.
Larry threw a few red herrings on the web cast announcement. He barely referred to SPARC or MySQL – two products that will certainly be revenue makers and inroads for bigger business. He has openly denounced Cloud Computing in the past, yet that has to be a major reason for the purchase. So what’s his plan for Sun? Just Java and Solaris – really?
In the bigger scheme this doesn’t mean much to IBM one way or the other. Oracle has tried to raise their red stack to match IBM’s blue one and failed in the past. They started out as not being in the stack business, instead focusing on “best of breed” systems. Obviously, they learned quickly from IBM that customers lay a lot of value on not having the hassle of dealing with integration. This is just one more step in that direction.
Even if the deal comes through despite possible anti-trust issues, it remains to be seen how Oracle treats existing Sun customers (read what the Tibco CEO has to say). There exists a significant amount of negative momentum amongst customers and the press on Oracle’s support policies. One wrong move and this could come tumbling down on them faster than they can say “Catch Exception”.
