Re: SMH on Salesforce-Oracle

On 6/26/2013 11:29 PM, Bruce Momjian wrote:

On Wed, Jun 26, 2013 at 08:02:02PM -0700, Adrian Klaver wrote:

Of course, there might be some other conclusion, logical or illogical,
but I can't think of one.

As someone else suggested, it is a chess game. Salesforce is
currently an Oracle shop. All the cat fighting aside, they need to
maintain a relationship with Oracle for the foreseeable future.
Oracle released earnings on June 20th and their stock immediately
tanked 8%+. They need to show forward momentum. The market
specifically called out their lack of success in making more money
with the hardware assets they got from Sun and their trailing the
trend to cloud computing. Not surprisingly the deals they have been
touting recently address both those issues. Notably lacking in the
press releases/stories are any hard numbers on actual dollar amounts
involved, so I would definitely take a wait and see attitude.

Yes, no question Oracle is hurting --- they missed financial targets in
4 of their past 9 quarters:
	http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323998604578565912150575302.html

and someday the press is going to clue in that Postgres is part of that.
The issue with Salesforce is the length of the deal --- 9 years.  It is
hard to call that just "maintain a relationship with Oracle".

Now, if that 9 years is somehow _optional_ on Salesforce's part, then
there might be something to the "maintain a relationship", but I have
not seen anything suggesting that.

I would be really surprised if Salesforce went for that deal.  Got to believe that they have the option to do other stuff.  The more I think about it, the weaker Oracle looks in this exchange.

I guess time will tell...