Sales bullies of desperation?
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I just had a weird experience. I have a very small company in a 3rd world country that you probably never heard of. The "official" representative for our country came out and talked to our main customer -- and talked them into installing a small application that would "show them how they could save money on maintenance". Because of my skills and experience with Oracle, I was selected to install their little application and send them the data, (they couldn't be bothered to fly out to our little stinking country in person). I had to make lots of edits to get the program to run at all. Oracle refused to respond to any question, suggestion or comment. Eventaully, they send a report to the customer which said "you are underlicensed" -- please pay us for <large number> of users for license and maintenance within 30 days. In the report, they only mention one license. I sat down with the customer and checked all their licenses and they were not only fully paid up, they were "overlicensed" if you want to call them up. Oracle tried to buy us off telling us that we would get a percentage of what they earned from sales. They also made comments about how our company would be the main point of contact for Oracle licenses. We just found out that Oracle is directly calling up our customer for sales calls. We are trying to figure out what the legal ramifications are. If you buy some software and license it, but are have too many cpus or too many users, can they just come along and make you pay extra money? If they wanted us to reduce CPU's we could just yank a few out and everyone would be happy. It made a really bad impression on our customers. If they could even justify the amount of money they were asking, I could probably make more than that just switching the customers to SQLServer or something. Is Oracle now so hard up for money that they have to stoop to these kinds of tactics to make any money? I always thought they made so much from government and fortune 500 back in the US they could get along with people cheating all the time.
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@swstephe said:
Is Oracle now so hard up for money that they have to stoop to these kinds of tactics to make any money? I always thought they made so much from government and fortune 500 back in the US they could get along with people cheating all the time.
With international stuff like this, it usually indicates that some sales VP back at the head office is a little short on their bonus quota for this year. They don't have any real sales prospects left before the deadline so they need to make some up. They always hit up the remote countries because the story won't get back to the board.
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This is standard practice for Oracle. I worked for a VERY large customer of there's (a very large ISP here in the US) and Oracle would come in and check out CPU counts and leave with a very large check once a year to cover maintenance costs (which was never used).
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It's sales what do you expect....
