Oracle software opinions

[Andrew]

So, does anyone have anything good to say about Oracle software? I'm an IT Account Director and most of my large accounts have an Oracle DB at the backend which does its job very well indeed - few complaints when it comes to their DB. What about their other products though?

At work I've been asked to look at Oracle products with a view to selling them into my current accounts and also to new companies. Thing is though, I used to work at Oracle in Reading and some of the stuff that was trawled out (1998/1999) was rubbish. Even now, my larger accounts might run Financials or Siebel and they don't really rate them or always comment they are outrageously priced and take too much work to get to do something you want.

Allied to that, the fact another account of mine was told they were too small to be dealt with (they are small but what arrogance) and I've also had some odd experiences with their Sun buyout (like not allowing two suppliers to bid on the same bit of work with identical price support) means I've not got a great feeling about them.

Lots of people in IT here so their view would be interesting to me, but also those that have either chosen Oracle at their work (maybe HR or something) or work with it day-to-day.

[Cupramax]

Our old (now replaced) ERP system was NT4 Oracle 7.34 based or should I say the back end was, 1999 vintage so interested to see you thought it was crap.... Never had an issue with it in 9 years. Absolutely solid as a rock, survived power cuts, hardware failures and all sorts but always came back up first time. Infact its still going now but locked for transactions and sat on a Vm.

When we replaced that system we looked at Oracles ERP solution but found their solution way too expensive and then arrogant so we ended up with SAP running on SQL.

Edited May 18, 2010 by Cupramax

[garcon magnifique]

Have very little dirct dealing with midrange systems, but it's worth noting that these days Oracle = Sun = Storagetek. i.e. now one big company with a very broad offering that most large accounts will have difficulty avoiding!

[Andrew]

Cupramax - I didn't deal with the high end stuff - more the lower end stuff they churned out around the .com boom. Interesting comment though so thanks for that - especially around the cost and attitude.

Garcon - this is true and my biggest account is certainly well intertwined with them, as much as they hate it (they run Siebel too). Of course, this raises another point about the fact most companies are covered as accounts and thus I'm not really able to see the huge opportunity!

[burble]

I'm a huge fan of the Oracle RDBMS, but later versions tend to be quite fragile.

I've got a few systems running 9i, some with 10g and some with 11g. The 9i systems are must more robust and less likely to get fecked up and lose a control file and so on.

[mb]

Can't help much but saw a SAP presentation the other day where they kept saying were very keen to engage with SME's & the smallest install they had was a drycleaners or something in London so couldn't fault that part of their attitude at least - probably because have run out of big clients though so hopefully Oracle may be less arrogant too now ?