Former Oracle execs warn that Big Red's auditing process is also a 'sales enablement tool'
- Reference: 1643113925
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/01/25/oracle_audits/
- Source link:
Speaking during a [1]webinar broadcast last week , Adi Ahaja, senior director of Palisade Compliance and former Oracle licence management services (LMS) manager, said that Oracle's audit has become "a sales enablement tool."
[S]ales has far more power within Oracle than the audit team. If sales want something done, they get their way
[2]Oracle's website says Oracle LMS "operates independently from any ongoing commercial discussions. Our services are delivered by a global team of highly experienced and knowledgeable consultants who collectively offer unrivaled knowledge on all aspects of Oracle's licensing policy."
However, in practice there was a close relationship between sales and licence audits, Ahaja said.
"There are sales goals that are based on audit numbers and how much revenue comes from auditing customers. It's not like they're just doing it in a vacuum. Typically, [auditors] get permission or approval from the [sales] team, so they're aware; and sales has far more power within Oracle than the audit team. If sales want something done, they get their way. A lot of the time what the audit has become is a sales enablement tool. The auditor goes in, finds some leverages and hand that to the sales team and you negotiate with them."
[3]
Ahaja was speaking at a webinar by Palisade Compliance, a company that advises and represents Oracle customers in issues and disputes around licensing Big Red's software.
[4]
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Speaking on the call, Craig Guarente, Palisade CEO and former Oracle veep in the LMS team, said the participants represented 50 years of experience in dealing with Oracle licensing practices.
He noted that there was nothing illegal about Oracle, or any company, using auditing to drive revenue.
[6]
However, Ryan Bendana, Palisade Compliance director of delivery, said Oracle's LMS were there to help sales teams facilitate conversations.
"Oracle has a lot of sales reps and they're all very hungry and they're all chomping at the bit to try to sell something. A lot of customers tend to be annoyed with Oracle for good reason. LMS is actually a great facilitator to open up a dialogue, and that's what sales is doing."
The Register has asked Oracle for its point of view.
[7]
Oracle customers are also experiencing challenges over licensing in VMware environments, other Palisade experts claimed.
The issue dates back to 2015 after US confectionery giant Mars took Oracle to court in the US over its licensing terms following an audit. Mars was represented by Palisade.
[8]Support specialist Rimini Street found in contempt of court for continued Oracle copyright infringements
[9]Another day, another ERP project behind schedule: This time it's Norfolk County Council and an Oracle system
[10]Diagnosis confirmed: Oracle has a case of healthcare cravings, bought Cerner for $28.3bn as the cure
[11]Oracle finance application customers more likely to leave for another vendor than SAP's – analyst
The Register found [12]that similar issues had been affecting a number of customers . Oracle does not accept VMware's worldview on licensing and its definition of hardware partitioning. An Oracle partitioning document showed how it only accepted Solaris containers, IBM's LPAR, and Fujitsu's PAR. VMware was not on the list of hard partitioning partners.
Ahaja said one of the biggest misconceptions on Oracle audits remained around the VMware issue. "That is in the middle of every audit and the driver of half their deals. I still find it outlandish."
The panel also discussed challenges as Oracle users move to the cloud and the licensing pitfalls that transition might present.
Last year, [13]Oracle failed to block a legal case that alleges it inflated cloud revenues with dubious sales practices, although the vendor succeeded in reducing its scope. Big Red denies the claim made by a group of investors [14]led by the City of Sunrise Firefighters' Pension Fund in 2020 , which alleged Oracle misled investors about sales of its cloud products by threatening customers with expensive software licensing audits unless they agreed to use Oracle's cloud software. The most recent amended complaint in the case was [15]filed in June [PDF] last year.
On the Palisade webinar, Max Shlopak, strategic delivery leader and former Oracle senior manager at LMS, said there was a general trend of Oracle wanting to create doubt over licensing during the transition to the cloud.
"Oracle wants all the customers, all of its customers, to move to Oracle Cloud, and they try to create all kinds of roadblocks that could scare customers from going to any other cloud provider. For example, [they might say] you need double the number of licenses, as they have in some white papers. They might say you can't go to that cloud because you can't get support from Oracle for deployments. The list goes on and on. Most of it – if not all of it – really amounts to fear, uncertainty and doubt that they're trying to create.
"The reality for all the customers is that they need to really go back to what is in their contracts with Oracle. Not Oracle's interpretation, especially interpretation of wisdom from their sales teams, but actual Oracle actual contracts in black and white." ®
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[1] https://www.linkedin.com/video/event/urn:li:ugcPost:6874810873677000704/
[2] https://www.oracle.com/corporate/license-management-services/
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/databases&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YfAsu@GDPJcQmX24HpjPIQAAAJc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/databases&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YfAsu@GDPJcQmX24HpjPIQAAAJc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/databases&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YfAsu@GDPJcQmX24HpjPIQAAAJc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/databases&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YfAsu@GDPJcQmX24HpjPIQAAAJc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/databases&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YfAsu@GDPJcQmX24HpjPIQAAAJc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/14/support_specialist_rimini_street_found/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/11/norfolk_county_council_oracle_delay/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/21/oracle_acquires_cerner/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/14/oracle_sap_forrester/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2016/02/24/oracle_vmware_license_headache/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/26/judge_denies_oracle_cloud_appeal/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2020/02/21/oracle_cloud_fake_sales_allegations/
[15] https://regmedia.co.uk/2022/01/25/oracle_consolidated_complaint.pdf
[16] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Why? Why do people still use Oracle?
It's still the only game in town for really big systems.
If you're truly "really big", and it's mission critical, you've probably got a team of just legal people working around these issues before they arise. If you're only slightly big, you almost certainly have alternatives, mission critical or not.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/migration-complete-amazons-consumer-business-just-turned-off-its-final-oracle-database/
If Amazon can get rid of Oracle, internally, then I'd wager 99.9% could get rid of Oracle. How many e-tailers are bigger than Amazon? Not many.
Unlike Amazon, if you are large but not that large, you probably can't afford to pay developers to rewrite, re-test and redeploy a bespoke system on a newer vendor.
In the ideal world, yes but in the real world; well, I am sure you know how awkward it is to get upper management to do something "correct".
First movers advantage
Oracle was the first RDBMS released, and helped first but success of VAX/VMS then UNIX. Really big, important systems stuck was the IMS, then DB2.
Oracle has always been simpler to work with because of multi-version concurrency control, but now that the cost of MVCC is lower (relative to network/disk latency) all other "adult" (i.e. not MySQL) have added it.
Postgress is going to eat their lunch in the medium term.. long-term licence fees will be cut.
Nope
No, it is not.
There are way cheaper tools, that are comparable.
And with the dame amount of money you can build way better systems.
Handful of reasons:
1. Legacy. 10 years ago, if you wanted a robust, vendor supported DB solution, Oracle was one of the few shows in town. This makes for a lot of systems deployed on Oracle
2. Inertia. Once you have 100s of DBs on Oracle, it's harder to introduce another one. Many companies will have a policy like "all databases to be Oracle" because they've standardised on it.
3. Features. Oracle does have some features that are rare in other products. Probably >95% of DB use cases will never use any of those features, but if you need feature X, you really need it.
4. Application vendor support. "We support our application with Oracle DB" means you pretty much have to deploy Oracle if you want it to work. For some of these applications, there may not be a replacement which supports PG/Maria and is "good enough".
I strongly suspect that 90% of Oracle databases could well be managed with PostgreSQL, MariaDB or whatever quite happily with negligible development work, but the legacy and inertia issues mean they're stuck on Oracle.
3. Features...
Many years ago I had the dubious pleasure of being both an Oracle DBA and an Ingres DBA at the same time.
Oracles main features seemed to be... Cost more, Crashed more, Harder to configure correctly, needed much more hand holding.
Ingres, on the other hand, didn't seem to care what happened, it sorted itself out. Yeh there were sticky moments but it is safe to say that my memories of bad things happening with Ingres are far fewer than bad things happening with Oracle.
Of course, thats just anecdote. I am sure Orcale is a robust and competent product however one's attiudes are coloured by one's experiences....
Sounds exactly like Bloomberg.
I'm shocked, shocked I tell you!
Seriously though, not surprised at all. Many years in the IT game have forced me not to trust Oracle as far as I can throw them. I've seen what happens when they decide that you appear (to them) to be outside the license terms (like in CPU count) and the result one way or another is very expensive.
I've got a handful of Oracle Linux subscriptions up in March and I've already got the sales droids contacting me. My boss has already indicated that he thinks the renewal of the current level is too much (I don't disagree!) and we should drop down some. They won't be happy.
When it came to replacing CentOS 8, we did take a proper look at Oracle Linux (both free and paid) as it did tick some boxes. But there were certain things that the sales droids seemed to agree to verbally, but pretty much refused to put into writing. Obviously we knew what would happen if we went forward, so that got kyboshed.
And as I'm here, don't get me started on why in this day and age Oracle DB (or at least our DBAs) still insist on using X being available for the installer. Really should be some web-based front end nowadays like pretty much everything else.
Licensing should not be that hard
When I worked for $vendor, notorious for the complexity of its licensing and the resulting audits, I amazed my colleagues and sales force by pushing through a licensing simplification that reduced multiple pages of terms, conditions, and special cases, including one so arcane that literally nobody still working there understood what it was (and flowcharts!) to something that would fit on the back of a postcard and still leave room for the name and address.
We also gave customer a 20 line script that could tell them instantly what they should be licensed for - unlike the previous scheme that often stumped even the independent expert consultants sent in to audit compliance. Audits were commonplace under the old scheme, and routinely pissed off customers; I never knew anybody to get audited under the new scheme.
One customer, on hearing the new model for the first time, asked me, "Are you sure you work for $vendor?".
Astonishingly, even the sellers preferred it: they didn't have to learn obscure features of the product just to price it correctly, and they could spend their time talking up the benefits of the software instead of trying to explain the licensing.
Re: Licensing should not be that hard
Ask Oracle how to license Solaris for a VM. Nobody knows... We just bought one license per VM, but maybe it should have been one per socket, for the whole VMWare cluster that the VM could migrate to. Since they didn't know we just went with what we thought reasonable, and felt happy defending in court if necessary.
Oracle? Bah.
Just use an Excel spreadsheet like everyone else.
Fancy schmancy folks use MS Access, but that's always just to make the end result look pretty.
Excel: the best database in the world!
*Cough*
*Inserts a giant, blinking, neon sarcasm tag just in case*
Sales...
Auditing as a sales enablement tool - Is there any similarity with the Church of Scientology here?
using audits to scare more $ out of customers?
this is definitely not news.