The Oracle Way
Once upon a time, Oracle was an industry leader because they provided an innovative product. The relational database was a sea change in the way companies collected and leveraged data. No longer beholden to closed mainframe systems with arcane reporting capabilities, this new database allow companies to build more and better systems and technology companies to offer more flexible business applications.
Then Oracle was an industry leader because they were simply bigger than everyone else. They had the most hard working, crafty, and relentless sales staff in the entire tech world. In this era, Oracle spawned a huge number of entrepreneurs that went on to create companies such as Siebel, Salesforce, NetSuite, and many others. Many others are angel investors, working as VC’s, or in some way shaping the technology market as executives.
Then Oracle was an industry leader because they simply bought every tech company under the sun. They used to keep things close to the chest and build everything themselves, then realized it is easier to just buy your way into a market. Thus, they launched their aggressive takeover of Peoplesoft, and then proceeded to buy companies such as Siebel, Hyperion, BEA Systems, Sun, and their most recent acquisition of customer service SaaS provider RightNow Technologies. They have bought close to 75 companies to date.
But now Oracle is an industry leader of lawsuits in the technology market. They do not build innovative technology. They do not have a superior sales team. They are still buying companies, but it is merely a strategy to continue to grow their tentacles into a range of companies and industries. They also realize that the acquisitions also tie up a significant amount of protected intellectual property, which can be used to twist the arms of competitors.
The latest breaking news item from Oracle is a new trial against SAP related to the TomorrowNow fiasco. From the court filing:
Oracle has no choice but to elect a new trial, as accepting the remittitur would force Oracle to risk waiving its right to appeal the Court’s decision on the motions for judgment as a matter of law and for a new trial. Oracle’s objective is to obtain clarification of the law and, if it is right about what the law is and what the evidence supports in this case, to vindicate the verdict of the jury and Oracle’s intellectual property rights as a copyright owner. Accepting the remittitur would be contrary to this objective.
One cannot help but wonder if “Oracle’s objective is to obtain clarification of the law” has broader implications than this one filing. Oracle has already shown itself ready to take aggressive action in its pursuit of protecting its IP in the Google Android lawsuit. Could Oracle now be positioning itself in the patent trolling industry?
Oracle is still very much a critical and important member of the technology community. They are one of the few companies that have the wherewithal for large tech acquisitions. Other than IBM, there is no other tech company that has as deep of a grasp of enterprise business technology and the market. They employee way more people than even tech stalwarts such as Microsoft, Apple and Google. There are Oracle alumni that are still founding startups, and startups in the enterprise tech market that are looking to Oracle as a potential acquirer.
All that being said, one has to wonder if Oracle is grasping for straws in its desire for growth. It is late to the cloud and offering customers credible SaaS based services. It has not released anything that has been groundbreaking and innovative in over a decade. They merely cycle through a series of iterative product updates to ensure customers continue to pay yearly. When Oracle makes news, it is more about a lawsuit or legal snafu than for anything interesting from a technology perspective. It was easy to understand what Oracle was in past years, but there is a sense that the Oracle Way is not much of a way at all these days. Oracle merely exists without much purpose other than to feed from the trough of customer maintenance fees and eating tech companies for dessert and every so often going Gozilla on some unsuspecting sector of the tech market with nuclear lawsuits.
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