Red Hat To Oracle: Have You Tried Free?

Oracle probably isn’t the first company that comes to mind when words like “austerity” are used. Perhaps for that very reason Oracle president Mark Hurd recently took to the blog-o-sphere to argue that going all-in with Oracle, even at a premium price, delivers better value. Ironically, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst used the same LinkedIn blog platform just a few days earlier to argue a very different picture of what customer value looks like.

Hint: It looks a lot like “free.”

Oracle Tries Out A Jobsian Reality Distortion Field

Hurd’s post is somewhat surreal. Basically, it reads like an anti-Oracle screed, talking up the need for CIOs to do more with less, talking down legacy enterprise apps and infrastructure, but conveniently overlooking the fact that it Oracle that dominates IT budgets—and not in a good way. He derides applications and their underlying infrastructure that are 20 years old (some of Oracle’s applications are 20 years old and its database is even older), insisting that “they require enormous funding to keep them fed and watered—and that’s why there’s nothing left over for innovation.”

According to Gartner’s recently released vendor rating for Oracle, Hurd should know. The Redwood Shores giant gets positive marks for its technology, and improved ratings on support. The one area that it went from bad to worse? Pricing. As the report notes:

IT procurement professionals express frustration with negotiating Oracle contracts, dealing with changes in pricing and license metrics—especially for Oracle acquired products—and the significant increase in audits. In surveys, IT procurement professionals consistently rate Oracle as the most challenging vendor with which to do business.

You don’t increase your rate of audits unless you’re trying to squeeze more money from an existing customer base. That’s not surprising, given that Hadoop and other new technologies are hammering Oracle’s technology relevance and pricing power, according to The Wall Street Journal. It’s why Cowen & Co. analyst Peter Goldmacher calls argues