This book brings together the conjuncture of three distinct, but related, aspects of Oracle

• Oracle Licensing & Compliance Information
• Oracle Culture & Procurement Negotiation Best Practices
• History of Oracle and its contribution to the growth of data management. Also included here is the romance of competing technologists & some of the finest companies working on the forefront of data engineering

The future is happening now:
I am writing this at the cusp of a period that is seeing huge changes in the enterprise technology deployment and licensing paradigm. I believe that Oracle will continue to be of immense importance to enterprise customers but, the future is happening now and it will be interesting to see how Oracle shapes up

Reasons For Writing This Book

While there are many purely technical books on Oracle’s products & also a few chronicling the life of Larry Ellison (and by that its history), I have not found even one book or blog that can bring together the story of Oracle, the licensing challenges faced by its customers and the cultural behavior of its employees that influences procurement negotiations.

CIOs, CFOs, CPOs, IT Asset Managers, IT Infrastructure Managers, Technical folk, and many others are continuously researching Oracle products, licensing, contracting and how to negotiate.

This book is written to save researchers a considerable amount of time and, thus, facilitate the public interest in the dissemination of information regarding Oracle’s products and licensing mechanisms, sales culture, negotiation tactics as well as its history that has made Oracle an important company.

Oracle Licensing & Compliance Information

• Oracle’s On-Premise licensing issues, migration of Oracle to the cloud and Oracle annuity support challenges will continue to be important in the next few years.
• Oracle’s licensing is complex and needs to be understood to get the best value from investments.

Oracle History & Culture

I have written in more detail the need for understanding Oracle’s culture in the chapter “Background Blindness in Procurement”. At this point I am solely touching upon the importance of Oracle to data management.

• The history of data management is also the history of Oracle.
• Before the birth of Oracle, people had Rolodexes, paper memos & punched cards. There was EDP (electronic data processing) controlled by a small group of companies working for large enterprise customers.
• Oracle gave birth to the commercial RDBMS thus laying the foundation for modern data management technology. Understanding Oracle’s history & competitive battles is one of the best ways to get introduced to the changes in data management technologies over the past four decades. Their innovations in database functionality continues to shape the industry.
• The personality of Larry Ellison & advances in technology influences the roadmaps for their products & the company’s engagement with their customers. It also gives us a glimpse into the aggressive nature of its salesforce.