Oracle licensing is simply too expensive, as is annual maintenance and support, users grumbled in a survey this week, with the majority of Oracle’s customers actively planning to reduce their spend with the vendor; although most have limited plans to migrate off on-premises environments and onto the cloud.
That’s according to a report this week by Rimini Street, the third-party software support provider for Oracle and SAP products, which surveyed 205 IT, finance and procurement professionals professionals at the C-suite to management level throughout North America, revealing widespread discontent at cost and “aggressive” audits.
Of those surveyed at the C-Level, VP/Director of IT and Procurement roles, over 50 percent said they are currently reducing or planning to reduce spending on Oracle. They cited a variety of issues with the costs of doing business with Oracle, as well as the overall health of their relationship with the vendor.
There was only moderate appetite to migrate off on-premise Oracle databases and onto the cloud however: of those that are considering it (38.6 percent, versus 46.2 percent opting to stay on-premises).
AWS narrowly won out over Oracle Cloud as the preferred option at this point, followed by “other”, with Azure in fourth place.
Rimini said: “Oracle customers are seeing a disconnect between the realities of running IT environments day to day and the ever-increasing demands for their business teams to roll out game-changing innovation. While the executive team lays out priorities for fueling growth and improving competitive advantage, IT is all too often committed to a vendor technology stack and roadmap that ties up their people, funds and processes.”
“Oracle’s proposed fix for these problems is to migrate customers to the Oracle Cloud. However, according to our research, most licensee respondents are either not choosing to migrate to the cloud at all, or they are migrating but not choosing Oracle Cloud. Reasons cited include cost, business disruption and lack of a business case.”
Oracle Licensing: Too Expensive, But Disruption’s a Pain Too…
While the survey has a US focus, the findings are intriguing: 70 percent are dissatisfied with the value they receive from Oracle software enhancements, but disrupting established ways of doing business clearly still look un-enticing. (Oracle’s systems tend to be ones that touch numerous mission-critical parts of a business: migration off them is, too often, fraught with risk and the looming fear of downtime…)
As for Oracle Cloud? 53 percent said they see no sound business case for moving to Oracle SaaS, 30 percent believe it will be too expensive and 28 say it would be too disruptive to migrate.
Some 73 percent of Oracle customers moving to cloud environments are choosing alternative cloud providers instead, the survey shows.
(Rimini’s angle: that it can help IT teams “break free from vendor-dictated roadmaps to secure, future-proof, manage and modernise their existing software and liberate IT resources to fund innovation” as a managed service…)
The report comes as Oracle this week called reporters to its HQ to discuss the opportunity the company sees to grow its revenue by moving its existing customers running on-premises software to the cloud: “There are just incredible levels of interest about getting out of legacy systems and getting into modern SaaS,” said co-CEO Mark Hurd. If Rimini’s report is accurate, it just might not be Oracle’s Saas…
See also: “This is What Happens Larry”: Amazon Finally Dumps Oracle Data Warehouse
Top image credit: Håkan Dahlström
