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Technology Stocks : Oracle Corporation (ORCL) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mephisto who wrote (10875)	6/1/1999 9:58:00 AM
From: Michael Olin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 19080

Oracle still has not figured out how to sell its software in an e-commerce environment. One of my clients spent an hour or so on the phone with their Oracle sales rep last Thursday. It was pretty much the last day to book business in the FY, and they were ready to cut a PO that day if they had to. They needed pricing on upgrading their RDBMS license from a single 4 processor Sun box to two 8 processor boxes. They were also looking at going from the Standard RDBMS to Enterprise edition. They expect to be able to support a connection pool of 1000 simultaneous connections to the database from their application server. By all accounts, only a small percentage of these connections will actually be in use at any given time. It took forever to get the numbers together because the sales rep had to keep juggling different pricing models. Named user, concurrent user, theoretical maximum users per-CPU. This is ridiculous. I know that the return to MIPS based pricing has been widely ridiculed, but at least you would know exactly what you were looking at. And all of these gyrations were for a division of a muti-national company that has a worldwide agreement with Oracle, with specified discount levels. The only thing that really seemed to get the sales rep going was when the idea of putting the "On Oracle" logo on the site was briefly raised. It's too bad we couldn't be in the room to see his jaw hit the ground and the saliva flowing. Oracle has the products to sell and customers who desperately want to buy them. The team that handles the hardware support and ISP couldn't believe how difficult it was to get prices (or how ridiculously high the first 3 iterations were). And they needed the numbers to make their expansion pitch to the CEO! When they started talking about how easy it would be (and inexpensive) to get pricing from Informix... Sometimes I wonder how this "great" sales force of Oracle's ever gets the deals signed. They don't seem to be able to put a package together in a straightforward manner, even when you already have master agreements in place. -Michael