First came the SAP outrage about Larry Ellison’s comments in his OOW keynote. Then came my friend Josh Greenbaum’s rant about the vibe at OOW. Now comes an accusation of Oracle is trying to smear competition at a prospect.
Surely Oracle is back to its old, evil ways?
Well consider this. That anyone, not just Larry Ellison, could well think HANA runs on just 0.5 TB of main memory. Several of SAP’s own HANA web pages around the world, like this one say “Results achieved with SAP HANA 1.0 with one 4-way, 8 core server (2.27 GHz clock speed) with 0.5 TB of main memory, 2 TB of SSD storage and 1Gb Ethernet running on an open source operating system.” May be SAP should update the language to say IBM and other partner platforms are certified with much larger memory, and helpfully also show the higher price tag.
That I told Josh in person that he more than other influencers is lucky to live within an hour of Oracle HQ. He can surely arrange many one on ones during the year, not wait for a big event like OOW where executive time is at a premium, and ideally prioritized for customers, not influencers.
That at Gartner I used to get smear material about competitors in unmarked yellow envelopes. The fact that Ford got something in an Oracle envelope not an unmarked one and yet has a paper stamp not a metered one common in corporate settings makes it unusual (and one which Oracle should investigate). But the practice been going on in our industry for eons –see point 9 in one of the most read posts on my blog on Top 10 Stupid Salesperson Tricks
Like George Bush, I got to see the eyes and souls of many an Oracle executive at OOW last week. I saw professionals proud of their products, apologizing for delays, worried about rapid changes in the market, deferential to their customers, very aware their brand is not the most popular in the market.
Do they posture and exaggerate? Do they play to win? Absolutely, but no worse than other vendors and I have dealt with hundreds in my career.
Sure, demonize Oracle all you want, but I didn't see evil in those eyes.
