Fred:
>Maybe Oracle will Buy REDB!!!
I doubt it. First of all, they've spent too much effort and $ trying to make their engine datawarehouse-viable. Second, they've spent too much bluster bragging about how they're going to squash the poor little company.
>Its hard to compete against the big boys.... Big companies do
>not want to do business with smaller companies if they don't
>have too.... They like to standardize on the Oracles, Micro
>softs, Dells, Compaq's, etc....
Unfortunately, that's true. I work for a very large company and we've standardized on Oracle in an attempt to minimize the number of databases we have to support and maintain contracts for. As DBA's we had quite a struggle to help our CTO and other powers-that-be to see the light with REDB. We believed in the technology so strongly, though, that we were determined to fight. Fortunately, we have a fair-minded CTO who allowed us the freedom of this choice (after much serious research and discussion), and we're now on our way with REDB.
There are a couple of ironies here, too. First, big companies may want to do business with the large and stable Oracles of the world, but it's only the big companies that have deep enough pockets to afford the big price of a small company like REDB. Oracle is a "mass producer," and severely undercuts the price of a small company struggling for every sale. Those companies focused on such short-term factors as purchase price will buy Oracle not realizing what they give up longer term in other areas such as DBA costs (it takes way more DBA's to manage an Oracle environment) and hardware.
Second, the more the larger companies stay away from the REDB's, the more they help guarantee that the REDB's will go under.
>I trust there is a niche for their product and they will win
>contracts..... but how big is this niche???
Well, REDB's niche is the datawarehouse niche, which is a multi-billion-dollar niche. I don't know how much of that pie is devoted to relational databases in particular (vs. hardware, OLAP tools, multi-dimensional db's, etc.), but I'm sure it's significant.
>I do feel this stock has bottomed at this price... but look
>at Novell, or Corel software..... just can't compete against
>the big boys and their stock stays down ....Eventually the big boys >catch up in the technology.
Yes, it doesn't seem to go any lower than 5, does it? Whether Oracle truly catches up remains to be seen.
>I talked to a friend who is in sales at Oracle... and he told
>me that he rarely sees a data warehousing sale.... what should
>that tell us....
That's surprising ... unless he meant v 8. There are TONS of companies with data warehouses built on v 7. I presume Oracle isn't pushing v 7 anymore. I think companies needing to build warehouses right now are maybe reluctant to go with the "0" release of the new version, as they should be. We're at 8.0.3 right now, and when I get back to work tomorrow, first thing I have to do is get the 8.0.4 patch applied which is supposed to fix a bunch of things. I think it may be a while before 8.1 comes out. That's OK ... more time for REDB to do more new and innovative stuff. :-)
Did your friend indicate who he's losing most of his data warehouse sales to? Probably Sybase IQ.
Red Brick DBA |
