RE: Oracle out the door
- From: "Matthew Zito" <mzito@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <wbfergus@xxxxxxxxx>, <jhthomp@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2008 16:32:58 -0400
To that end, there are also a number of companies that exist to help
with this negotiation and contract process. One that I can vouch for
personally is Miro Consulting (disclaimer: I know the founders, my
company and Miro are sometime marketing partners, but I have no vested
fiscal interest in them). They can help you understand your current
licensing setup, ways to reduce the price, and generally help negotiate
an amicable setup.
Along the lines of this, something that I have seen many companies do is
keep a certain amount of an Oracle competitor (like enterprisedb, or sql
server, or Sybase) around as a way to have a stick to threaten Oracle
with.
Thanks,
Matt
-----Original Message-----
From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Bill Ferguson
Sent: Wednesday, April 30, 2008 2:48 PM
To: jhthomp@xxxxxxxxx
Cc: Job Miller; oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Oracle out the door
On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 11:29 AM, John Thompson <jhthomp@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
> That's what has mgmt. so upset. You can't selectively drop CPU
licenses.
> It's all or none.
>
I work for a government agency. Our parent Department (which consists
of about a dozen agencies) negotiated a contract for all the agencies,
covering EE, Spatial and a few other 'options', with support. For
anybody wanting to use additional 'features', they can buy those
licenses at a reduced price with support.
This saves all of the agencies mucho dollars/year, and gives most
people the core functionality they say they want. It also a lot
cheaper than SQL Server, which even though we have an Enterprise
contract with Microsoft, still costs $14K per license.In probably all
but a couple instances, that's far more than what the various Oracle
licenses cost us.
Oracle wants to keep you as a customer. A phone call or two to the
sales folks (or their managers) should get things straightened out at
a reduced yearly cost. If the sales rep can't get you a better price,
ask to talk to their manager, or the regional manager. Not sure what
it's like now, but when I first started using Oracle back in the early
90's, the sales force either met their sales quotas or were fired. Not
sure how they computed customers who left, but I imagine it was
counted against their quotas. Oracle needs that yearly money coming
in, almost as much as they need the new sales. If customers leave
almost as fast as new ones join, that leaves them with less market
clout and increases their competitors.
Has anybody in your organization looked yet at what 'options' are
needed for which databases, which can be consolidated onto a single
server or instance, etc? Without knowing anything at all about your 97
databases management wants to 'convert', I'd venture that you can
easily reduce the number of servers/instances at least in half,
probably to one third or one fourth. License a couple EE boxes for the
few that need the full blown capabilities of EE, and run most of the
rest on SE boxes. If management thinks SQL Server will handle what
those 97 other databases are doing, those probably don't need EE.
And always remember to remind management to calculate the ROI on
converting all of those databases to SQL Server. And as bad as Oracle
support can sometimes be, it is far superior to what Microsft has.
Some systems can probably be converted to MySql or Postgres without
losing any functionality fairly simply, but SQL Server will require
major re-writes of code and thought processes.
--
-- Bill Ferguson
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//www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l
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