Conference ulysse::rdb_vms_competition

    
    Randy,
    
    Have you seen 335.*?  There's ORACLE stuff in there.  Also scattered
    throughout the conference, I'm sure.
    
    Personally?  ORACLE is a royal pain-in-my-A$$!!!  I'm always bombarded
    by customers, prospects, and other interested parties going "What does
    Digital offer in the way of 4GL or relational databases (dduuhhh!), I
    keep hearing about this ORACLE outfit, and they say..."
    
    I sigh heavily and ask for a whiteboard and a few minutes of their
    time.
    
    Wanna know the real rub?  I'm in Volume.  I've gotta support one
    of Digital's oldest OEM's.  Guess what product they use to write
    their applications?  Yup.
    
    I'm going to hold off there.  Sometimes I just get so discouraged
    when I realize what we're up against.  To answer your question,
    though, "MY official" position is that I will not work with them,
    I'll not work for them, I won't recommend them, and I'll advise
    against going with them.  Regardless.
    
    BH

Why this hostility towards Oracle?  Please state situation, examples, facts,
etc.  We got the 'feelings' part, but why this tension?  I know little about
the Oracle-DEC Rdb climate...please fill me in.

Thanks

Marc

    
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    Well, first-off, I would hope that I'm not entirely alone in my
    feelings, and would seriously doubt that I am.  And there are several
    reasons for feeling "tension", depending on the areas in which you
    put the most emphasis.
    
    The # of Licenses angle:  There is not doubt, at least in this Area,
      that O has been rather effective at selling their product, not
      only to "new" database users, but into the existing VAX installed
      base as well.  Call it slick marketing, call it a "weak" Rdb/VMS
      message; Those are the facts.  They ARE the competition - they
      are not an OEM, a DEC distributor, or any other type of cooperative
      outfit.
    
    The Marketing angle:  I don't know about you, but I have a hard
      time *liking* any company that "lies" as they do.  256 TPS?
      Suuurrrrre.  And fairies will dance on the lawn at sunrise!
      "Biggest PC market share?" etc. etc.  Refer to MB's presentation
      'Winning the Database' in order to get insight into these myths.
      Larry Ellison, in an article that I've recently typed into this
      conference, is, from all indications, an extremely arrogant person,
      and much as KO's influence is felt throughout Digital and is
      manifested in DECculture, so have I found that Ellison's influence
      affects O's field people, both marketing and technical.  Part
      of being "The Youngest Curmudgeon" is not taking well to arrogance
      and hippocracy.  Succinctly, I don't like the way they do business.
    
      My attitude is that with O's marketing hype, they're trying to
      fool the public by presenting an overly inflated impression of
      the product, and yet the public is buying it!  That means that
      they're good liars, I guess.  No, I don't like that at all.
    
      Sure, we, I suppose, tried to optimize the he** out of our bench-
      marks for the best numbers, but at least we present a reasonable
      set of numbers... something approaching an attainable reality.
    
    The Mom & Apple Pie angle:  I don't like O in the way that they
      approach VAX from an architectural standpoint.  Cluster support?
      Interoperability with other products?  No.  Not there, at least
      not yet.
    
      One of the biggest selling features of the Digital product set
      is VIA - it gives you *options*.  If you don't like Cobol, code
      C.  If you don't like 3GL, code with a 4GL... AS LONG AS IT IS
      DSRI COMPLIANT.  If I were a customer, I'd go Rdb simply because
      it leaves many options open for development tools, end user aids,
      distributed environments, interfaces into yet-to-be-developed
      products and all that other jazz.  With DECwindows, CDA, and some
      of the other announcements, the argument just keeps getting 
      stronger every day.
    
    But perhaps we should give credit where credit is due:  Oracle must
    have a decent product, or they would have fallen long ago.  I don't
    put any stock in their marketing style or hype - Heck, IBM is known
    for being the best marketeers, and yet we all know that they don't
    really have the product in the midrange.  Yet they still sell.
    
    Why the tension?  Why the animosity?
    
    Because I advocate V.I.A.  Because I think Rdb is a product that
    can more than hold it's own in the marketplace.  Because I don't
    like arrogant, egotistical liars - or the philosophy that that's
    the way to do business.  (Maybe I should cross-post this to
    QUARK::HUMAN_RELATIONS?)
    
    So why should I work WITH them?  I'd much rather walk away from
    an account set on Oracle than bother trying to rescue the low-
    margin hardware-only sale.
     
                                                   
    Bob

    Perhaps, the company that does the best thing for its customers,
    is the one that has the best chance of being successful. And that
    is what Digital is all about (I've only been here 7+ years, so maybe
    I've missed something...)
    
    We used to to say that whoever 'owned' the network would 'own' the
    customer and there is some 'truth' in that. The network is the
    communication carrier for information, data etc.. But it is not
    enough. DIGITAL will fail if we just rely on DECnet and OSI, and VAX
    boxes to stay alive....
    
    IBM figured out a few years ago (and we recognised it recently)
    that whoever owns the desktop interface then owns a substantial
    part of the customer also. We now have a good opportunity in this
    space, but it is not enough to provide solutions for many customers
    unless you can tie in the database and the information mgmt.    
    
    Inbetween, you can postulate that whoever 'owns' the management
    and organisation of information, then owns the layer between the
    network and the user (desktop) interface. We now offer functionality
    in many areas of information mgmt that is superior.
    
    Ideally, we need to excel constantly (ie innovate all the time)
    in these three areas. Too many times, a customer rates one of these
    three (network, dbms, desktop) as more important than the other
    two and so is prepared to change the other two to suit the important
    one. If we provide the best in all three, then we have an opportunity
    to stay alive and grow - otherwise we are a fat duck waiting for
    other vendors like Oracle to take the middle and turn the rest.
    Own the database and you can change the desktop and h/w backbone...and
    Oracle doesnt mind who gets hurt. It happens all the time.
    
    Now, ORACLE have admitted that they would like to have their own
    machine out in few years - so we assume NOW that their long term
    support is not for any DIGITAL environment at all. Hence if we give
    Oracle business, we may be cutting ourselves out of the future
    partnerships with our customers.
    
    Our philosophies are different in so many areas... we believe that
    as a result, our systems are going to show this difference in
    ease-of-use, power, and all the other things that help protect the
    customers investment now and in the future.
    

    I would like to add my experiences with Oracle covering several
    customers.
    
    ==> At one customer Oracle was chosen because of a mixed environment
    (Bull and DEC).  I can accept that.  However, during the sales cycle
    and benchmarking Oracle:
	- Told the customer what a dog the 88xx line was and how Oracle
    		sent back their 88xx systems for 62xx systems.  This
    		was a really nice touch since we were sitting in the
    		LAX benchmark center watching the 8820 chug along
    		CPU bound.  (Customer did decide on his own to buy
    		8840, however.)
    	- Never provided cluster references "because we don't have to
    		... we're (Oracle) locked in"
        - Offered to run Sequent benchmarks when VAX was not meeting
    		throughput requirements
    	- Never supplied tuning and design expertise ... only pre-sales
    		support for our V6 benchmarks and they had no V6 training
    	- Promised to provide technical support to help DEC but when
    		we called for help they didn't have any people "but
    		we're trying to hire some"
    	- Went to the customer and told them Oracle V6 WOULD NOT cluster
    		and then "dropped by" our office to tell us "... oh
    		by the way, we told the customer ...".  (This destroyed
    		our cluster growth strategy.)  Then the next day they
    		called back and said they were wrong ... V6 WILL support
    		clusters.  A month later in LAX, V6 didn't come up at
   		all in the cluster so the sales rep and his SFO manager
    		had been jerking us around all the time.
    	- During our discussions with Oracle about performance in clusters
    		and in SMP machines, Oracle said "all performance problems
 		in clusters are caused by VMS lock manager".  Given
		the fact that the customer knew nothing about VMS, it
    		was very difficult to overcome this negative comment.
	- The only thing that saved this business for us was the fact
    		that the customer revised his performance numbers and
    		the 8840 NON CLUSTERED would handle his work load for
    		the next 18 months AND we delivered an Aquarius PID
    		the week before the decision was made.
    
    - At another customer, Rdb was selected for a project.  Oracle went
    	to the customer and told them that Rdb was slow (V2.3), didn't
    	match SQL standard, and was a bad decision.  Oracle was adopted
    	as the "standard".  Several months later, our consultants were
    	hired to tune their system (a VAXcluster) since Oracle performance
    	was very bad.  Later the customer decided to run Oracle on one
    	node only and to have a manual .COM file database failover.
     	
    	At another location for this same customer, FOCUS has been called
    	in to look at replacing Oracle's forms since performance is
    	so bad.  FOCUS is trying to get the customer to consider Rdb
    	as the backend ... jury is still out.
    
    - At another account we've got a need to connect to DB2.  Our solution,
    	based on ALL-IN-1 is very clean.  Oracle arrived and the customer
    	wanted us to describe how Oracle would integrate to A1 because
    	they perceived Oracle had better connectivity to DB2.  After
    	we exposed the drawbacks using Interlink, SQL*connect, poor
    	integration with A1, Oracle told the customer the reason they
    	haven't used our SNA gateway is because it is such a dog.  This
    	made the customer feel good since they recently purchased two
    	of our gateways.  
    
    	At this account, Oracle also told the customer how they could
    	connect PS/2 DIRECTLY to DB2 (without a VAX).  So, working with
    	them in a mixed IBM/VAX environment is very dangerous.  It looks
    	like we may get this business since VTX and A1 are in much need,
    	but the database work may go Oracle's way.
    
	A couple of days ago the Oracle sales rep called our sales rep
    	and wanted to trade leads and work together .... gag me with
    	and index !!!
    
        - At another customer, they have purchased an application which
    	requires Oracle.  Because of licensing fees, they can only afford
    	run the application on one node of their six node cluster and
    	can only afford 8-5 support.
    
    	In addition, they are looking at cheap clones to do Oracle
    	development instead of workstations.  Because the are engineering
    	and manufacturing, we've been trying for a long time to move
    	them to VAXstations.  Looks like this may be more difficult
    	now.
    
    - Just this morning, a sales rep asked my about Oracle's financials
    	and set up a meeting.  When I objected to working with Oracle,
    	he said, "... look ... if this sells VAXs ..." .... so here
    	we go again.
 
	
    ==> I don't like their way of doing business either.  Things I've
    heard them say/do:
	- the reason Oracle V6 is late is because they have so many
    	ports to support.
    	- they are switching to UNIX workstations (from VMS) because
    	it's a better development environment
    	- we (Oracle) don't care what system you buy (IBM, DEC, etc)
    	and only want to help the customer manage data
    	- we plan to support VAXclusters and are trying to decide if
    	we should write our own cluster lock manager
    	- customer and DEC asked for 6 weeks for SQL*connect and A1
    	integration.  Oracle played the "we're trying" bit AND NEVER
    	did deliver the information.
    
    
    These are just a few of the continuing insults and crap we have
    to deal with everytime we "partner" with Oracle.  Just to make
    matters worse, look at this Email I got from a workstation sales
    rep:

From:	KCDEMO::FARM::ANDERSONB    28-APR-1989 10:41
To:	kcdemo::duncan
Subj:	ORACLE on DS3100

    FYI
    

     <<< HARBOR::SHPLOG$DUA2:[NOTES$LIBRARY]WS_COMPETITIVE_FORUM.NOTE;2 >>>
================================================================================
Note 653.3                 SHIPPING PMAX Applications                     3 of 3
JULIET::GRANT_GA "Live free or WISH you had."        16 lines  21-APR-1989 20:34
                            -< ORACLE from ORACLE >-
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Well, sort of.  If your opportunity is big enough, ORACLE is shipping today.
Demo copies available.  Are in the process of porting their CASE stuff.

Vendor name:        ORACLE
Application name:   ORACLE
Type of application: database

Availability date:    demo NOW    shipping  semi-now

Plaforms this product runs on(including competitors):  you name it.

Contact(where possible): Deepak Puri    415-598-7543

This guy is goaled SOLELY on Ultrix sales of ORACLE.  Will be providing 30+
references.  Seems very enthusiastic.


        
    
--gerry

    The difference is philosphy. Oracle wants to control accounts via their
    software. That is, total dependency on Oracle software no matter what
    hardware you choose. That is diametrically opposed to Digital's
    philosphy.
    
    Consequently, we are direct competitors.
    
    Also, Oracle is developing their own hardware. They will then be a
    general computing vendor just like Digital.
    
    The question is, how much do you "like" any of our competitors?
    
    ---- Michael Booth

    Oracle is simply on the leading edge of what the computer industry is
    heading for.   As more and more computers need to be sold to a
    (proportionally) diminishing pool of technical people to evaluate them,
    hype, pizazz, lies, and all the other tricks of the automobile and
    stereo showrooms are starting to become commonplace in what used
    to be a professionals-selling-to-professionals game.

    I have not found that technical people do an appreciably better job
    selecting than business people who understand their corporate goals and
    how software can help them attain that goal.
    
    Sybase and Ingres have been very successful "hooking" the technical
    "professional" on their technical goodies.
    
    I trust the MIS types far more than the techies.
    
    ---- Michael Booth

    re: .2
    
    <flame_on>(magma_red)
    
    A bunch of low-life, half-breed, maggot breathing pond scum who
    don't have the decency or chutzpah to service an already sold customer,
    let alone return phone calls.  Companies who foster such negatism
    and out and out lies should be held under water until their last air
    bubble is popped.  Nothing less.
    
    <flame_off>        

    
>>        <flame_on>(magma_red)
>>    
>>    A bunch of low-life, half-breed, maggot breathing pond scum who
>>    don't have the decency or chutzpah to service an already sold customer,
>>    let alone return phone calls.  Companies who foster such negatism
>>    and out and out lies should be held under water until their last air
>>    bubble is popped.  Nothing less.
>>    
>>    <flame_off>        
  
    Gee, Carlos, have you ever considered primal scream therapy?  8^o
    
    You are, of course, referring to Oracle, no?  Why don't you tell
    us about the experiences you've had that lead you to looking for
    a trough of water.
    
    'Course, I always thought a 400 Volt Taser might be more appropriate.
    
    Bob

    case in point;
    
    the new case PID presentation doesn't mention SQL services (i believed
    to be available under ultrix)! but guess who is
    
    /los

Somewhere in this notes conference, maybe multiple places, I've
summarized the problem with ORACLE as being that their ethical standards
are not up to the same level as Digitals.  I've heard of MANY bad
experiences with them, but not having direct involvement in them I won't
report details.  What makes the situation with ORACLE so noticeable is
that the other database competitors approximate Digital's ethical position.

In terms of concrete reasons to avoid ORACLE, the main one is the
previously mentioned account control problem.  ORACLE intentionally
tries to turn customers into multi-vendor (read that as many-vendor)
shops.  The more vendors, the more entrenched is ORACLE.  So, a salesrep
who gets in bed to get THIS VAX sale stands a good chance of losing the
NEXT VAX sale to HP, and the following one to SUN, and then one to IBM, etc.

    In the future, since Oracle have announced the intention to badge
    engineer hardware, probably Sequent, the next sale will probably
    be lost to Oracle themselves. Moreover, anywhere Oracle currently
    has a foothold will be in danger of their recommending migration
    to their own kit.
    
    PDB