If you’re purchasing enterprise software, you’ll typically push for a discount based on the volume of seats you need and your previous and future history with the vendor. When it comes to dealing with Oracle, that may not get you very far.
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Gartner managing VP Michele Caminos highlighted Oracle’s hard-line negotiating tactics in a session on dealing with “megavendors” at Gartner Symposium 2013 on the Gold Coast. “Pricing and contract negotiation [with Oracle] is hard,” she said. “They don’t bend.”
Those discounts that are offered will only reflect the volume of the current deal, Caminos said. Even if you’re a long-term Oracle user, previous purchases won’t be factored in.
Arguably, Oracle can afford that stance because database systems in particular aren’t easy to swap out once in place. With cloud-based options, there’s more flexibility, though you still need an exit strategy for shifting data from one system to another.
An added complication for licence negotiations is the huge range of software companies Oracle has acquired. “They have not been very quick in rationalising their offerings,” Caminos said. “There’s a lot of overlap.”
Comments
2 responses to “Don’t Waste Your Time Asking Oracle For Discounts”
Not quite true. You may be able to get some discount or freebies such as training close to the financial year (May/June). Depends on if the Sales rep is trying to make up their numbers or not.
Anything to get you to close the deal so it counts towards their sales.
Any other time, yep, generally you have no hope.
Better yet, take your business elsewhere if you can. Oracle are one of the bad guys, stifling Java and MySQL development and pushing largely inferior products into the corporate world, then failing to adequately support them. Oracle Collaboration Suite in particular is a disaster. If your company thinks it can save money on Exchange licensing by going for OCS, tell them not to. I’ve worked for two large companies that both went to OCS and within a year they were back to Exchange amidst a whirlwind of bugs, missing emails and broken calendar events.