The Oracle Assessment

Brian Sommer, CEO, TechVentive | ZDNet | April 2013

Oracle’s in a lot of sectors selling to many different kinds of buyers. Any review of Oracle needs to take a portfolio view that also looks at the relative growth and contraction of the component market segments served.

Oracle is huge. No single assessment does this complex IT provisioner justice. While many of my peers speak of some tech companies in single-word assessments, I struggle with Oracle. And let me get this out of the way right now, I actually like some of the stuff they’re doing, I question some others, and am concerned about another group of activities.

To get your head around the thousands of products Oracle has is probably beyond the grasp of any one individual. Suffice to say, the big issues for Oracle investors, executives, and customers aren’t necessarily going to be buried in the minutia of individual products, releases, features, and performance gains. No, the questions are at a macro level, and they parallel massive shifts in the world of IT.

Oracle has broadly spread their considerable research and development (R&D) budget across a number of very traditional IT technologies, new-ish IT technologies, and some newer still technologies. In their marketing-speak, they say they offer customers “choice” and aren’t dictating terms or forcing upgrades on customers. It’s that thinking that’s been behind their Applications Unlimited program for many years.

But what Oracle really does is use their considerable R&D budget to stay in many distinct IT markets simultaneously. Oracle does this because it can, and almost no other competitor has the economic muscle to match them. The hard reality is that they spend billions (USD) each year on R&D. Most of their competitors can’t even scrape together a few percentage points of Oracle’s R&D spend.

To read the rest of Brian Sommer’s analysis of Oracle, please visit the ZDNet website.