I worked several projects over the years that heavily involved bending over bigtime for Oracle because they were the only solution that could get the job done at scale even if it was sometimes quite poor (I have a good story about how sensitive Streams is and how it shut down an entire country's flight system over something stupid). We were deploying Dell servers worldwide on a commodity contract (you got the latest base version) with Oracle as the DBMS with a "by the core" pricing. Every other month, Dell would send servers with more and more cores. This was like a $100m contract with about 80% of the cost in Oracle licenses. I remember going to a meeting with Oracle with the CIO of a very, very large government agency about a more equitable pricing model with the CIO giving the whole motherhood and apple pie spiel (this was a few years after 9-11), and the Oracle rep just did the Jesse James "pay up sucker" handshake. Oracle had the upper hand because there were just no offerings to match. We had the same situation when trying to move a major system into the AWS cloud, but Oracle refused to help migrate the Exadata appliance we relied on. I guess it's good to be Oracle, and too bad for everyone else that can't compete.

Biggest "gotcha" company I have ever been associated with. I was State and Local and the Texas rep went scorched earth in that state. He did not care as he was going to make his money and had his exit strategy already in play. They have gone after the hyperscaler and are very much in play. Safra Catz is one sharp cookie

I would spend two years getting my DBAs fully cleared, then Oracle would hire them away. We paid well but could not compete with those salaries.

I worked at Oracle during the "acquisition" and later at another company with some former Peoplesoft lawyers and operations. Great listening to them talk of how they tried to stop it.... once Conway dug in his heels he was gonna lose. Larry always figures out a way.

Actually ran into Craig in the hallway and told him to give Larry hell! He said, "What do you think I've been doing?", laughed, and gave me a high five. Fighting almost made it worse!

speech saying 'there is no way Oracle will EVER buy PeopleSoft'. Then I met a former coworker (left our company to run some mutual funds in San Francisco) for drinks. I told him what Conway said and he laughed and said 'not only will Oracle own PeopleSoft but the markets have already priced that into the stock'. Kind of funny in hindsight.

Though I’ve worked longer in SAP. They market Fiori like it’s bleeding edge, Peoplesoft had the web GUI in 2000!!!

retirement. In fact, I don't want to learn anything new (for work anyway) at this point so when this project is done I may call it a career.

incessantly since the earnings announcement yesterday afternoon. At least 2 of them could likely retire now if they sold. Crazy. ** Edited by vt90 at 9/10/2025, 12:39:25 PM