that is the de minimus approach, IMO:

my group billed the last Oracle deployment proposition for a full LOB disaster recovery contingency programme evaluation and priced it in units of median CxO option valuations.

Okay, that was the flippant part we kept to ourselves, but we did evaluate another BU's purported need for Oracle RAC in terms of economic impact, with a twist: we cited a board memo regarding the IT dept responsibilities that was phrased in terms of value to the corp in business continuity. We accounted for the impact of lost ROI on NREs and long term investment programmes such as select use of very high end storage kit to enable point in time recovery for virtually anything, for which we have a capacity provisioning budget, and itemised everwhere the Oracle RAC proposition was replicating existig IT budget with as yet evaluated risks. So we billed a advance iter departmental charge for a new evaluation of their proposal, plus potential HR drain on IT, plus a last killer factor: the question whether the Board should approve a diversion from a programme of IT investment secured a mere 4 years ago, which they are happy enough with to refer (indirectly) to in annual reports.

We went one further, we sent a formal request to Legal, for impact on our cient SLAs, where our systems could not be guaranteed (without new policies we furnished a budget for initial assessment and a timetable gantt chart) where we involved 3rd party liability: Would Oracle indemnify us if their systems in any way interacted with our SLAs, alternately what is the risk to that BU sales (separate document RFP sent to CFO) in event of a client crisis?

Needless to say, we were able to attach real enterprise wide costs _within the Oracle sales process itself _ far beyond their anticipated sale price, and the proposal died on the vine.

Detailed line items included inter departmental billing at contract rates for IT sitting in on planing meetings with Oracle, replete with citations from C Suite memos regarding unit costing and "matrix management", and examples of recent inter-dept. invoicing, and, the _coup de grace, a quote from Oracle themselves to provide the IT dept. the consultancy required to advise on the economic impact of a LOB data warehouse analysis installation on a non - Oracle ("greenfield"! ouch!) IT shop, so that we had from Oracle themselves a estimate at the least of their idea what time and manpower we needed to get the "best return" form that investment.

All the while, we spoke warmly about the (very real) robustness of Oracle in serious deployments, let out our misgivings of open source culture and development (we sell a commercial software service in a financial niche) and were entirely hospitable to the sales people Oracle sent. Sneakily, we led the introductions they needed, or would have needed, had we not, to use what i think is a very British expression "seen them coming from a distance".

The business where I work probably would never have existed without RDB, latterly Oracle, on VMS. I would not lightly denigrate Oracles ability, but i feel it is more like a teacher handing in a report card, bemoaning a brilliant child's talents that are being wasted, to praise Oracle in recent years.

Larry Ellison had - to my view - a superb chance when he slagged off cloud biz, quipping they did cloud since Kingdom Come....

.... Yes, now if Oracle had followed that up with letting people have full on geo clustered Oracle RAC plus bells & whistles in bundles at reasonable per user monthly simple contract rates, and explained, "Hey, we can do this, cloud is remote access, but cloud is not Five Nines and real time point in time backup when you run 100K queries a second, here are some usage budgeting plans that nobody else can dream of matching, OH AND it is Solaris/SPARC that enables this offering at this price point...."

Well, I am sure you get my drift,

I sadly think Larry was correct to dismiss, wrong to try to follow, and Terminally Wrong to not cannibalize their licensing model by making offerings that gave you true HA Oracle at low per user entry prices and linear scaled cost for size, latency, query ad query complexity rate.

What I would have done, were I Larry Ellison, would be to split off half of every product dev team to writing integrations with the competition's cloud offering.

Then I would open Per User accounted integration rates, to scoop the back end database off of any conceivable service you don't want to go down.

Every single product line, say PeopleSoft HR, I would pivot as high as half their developers to making say LinkedIN useful. LinkedIn takes 60 dollars or so per user per month, make Oracle the backend and charge 15 bucks per user per month, to let CxO folk feel happy a seriously robust back end is collating their sales interactions for one example, is how I would start my attrition of that revenue capture. If SalesForce gets 30 bucks a user on LinkedIN integration, I do not care if I get 20, I take that business away. I would target by customers who are deep int Oracle Financials, and build forecasting modules for them, to see LinkedIn data feed their analysis and forecasts.

I absolutely believe Oracle could be cannibalistic to many product revenues, whilst pivoting twice in this way:

- Pivot One: make Oracle RAC HA at least as cheap as per user SQL Server on Azure. (but with central linear scaled risers that ignore small enterprise and after say 50 users give a rational runtime fee for bigger databases)

Pivot Two: take half each product line developers, and task them to build integrations to every competitor in the same field. (this also is a twofold strategy, on one hand, make Oracle NOTCloud licensing support non Oracle uses at a low rate to get the data onto Oracle back end; then both undercut and offer price breaks for scaling DB size by adding further SLAs and support automatically as that scales up. Give No Reason for any cloud app to not have Oracle at the back end, Give a clear product cost ramp that competes with self hosting even without staffing costs DBAs etc)

Pivot Three: Take the remaining half of product line developers, and task them with Product,Next. The objective need to be make a small business accessible version of Oracle Financials, on a affordable cloud platform, and for high end, hire aggressively new data scientists to meet needs of big companies, either to develop products that make use of the cloud heterogenously or the data stores and silos and marts and all that stuff in intelligent ways, HA SLAs are throughout this a given, but now you charge per query or bulk deal.