US Firm Oracle Pulls Plug on Eskom

Is Oracle even BEE enough for eSkommel's liking?

Next eSkommel will play the race card and claim that Oracle was illegally awarded the tenders and request that the SIU and NPA have a few workshops (and other social engagements).

FTFY said:
Oracle, pay your eSkommel license, it's the right thing to do.
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FTFY.
 
Iwojima said:
Considering Oracle had claimed underpayment of R7.3b and then changed their minds and indicated it is "just" R400m I suspect she must have some relatives at Oracle too.
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Those were penalties. Over-usage of licenses.
He said two years after signing the contract, Oracle conducted an audit on Eskom’s use of its products after which it claimed that the utility had overused them.

He said Oracle wanted Eskom to pay it R7.6-billion in penalties for overusing the products but later whittled it down to R600-million.
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End of 2010 we were sitting at a client company in the financial sector just after Oracle had bought out Sun. Oracle claimed the company did not have OS licenses. Thing is Oracle had silently made changes to the Solaris OS licensing, allowing downloads of releases, not pointing it out. The client was also running Oracle DBs on Sun servers. But they had not stepped into the OS trap. An audit later, Oracle had found nothing and essentially shown themselves the door.

An Oracle sales lady tried the same on some very big iron 25k servers at a bank with their CEO. Same OS issue trick. She probably needed some comms for a new hair do. Once again, Oracle stuffed up and lost a big client.

At the stage Oracle messed up lot and lost a lot of clients. IBM was smiling all the way to the bank, their best sales teams were Oracle reps. They'd make appointments after teh Oracle reps had been and simply picked up orders. Unfortunately it also affected the market sector we were in.

Good kit, good software, but chuckling in Schadenfreude.

You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a **** about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle
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RonSwanson said:
Security philosophy is stuck in the 80s, the more they can obfuscate the better (for them).
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Security? What is that? Can we make money from it?

Not really that bad, but profit is the underlying motive. On the hardware side they will rapidly EOL stuff. All those nice features were suddenly a dead end with their firmware for clients used to 15yr lifespans. Upgrade -> Kaching!! When they tried pushing an Exadata at one client, supplied the pricing, it was rather funny. Imagine a client locked into a platform, needing a half ton bakkie. The smallest they sell is 30ton trucks. Amazingly that worked in the state departments, at the client it soared like a lead balloon (after they recovered from the heart palpatations). :laugh:
 
r00igev@@r said:
It would be easier to go onto IBM DB2 in Oracle compatible mode. Could run the whole of Eskom on one pseries.
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Amazon migrated 5,000 databases with 50 petabytes of data to PostgreSQL.
The tools used are open source and available to Eskom.

Just requires some motivation and decent DBA skills.
 
US supreme Court ruled against Oracle in their claim against Google. They lost billions of USD. Well potential USD in damages and licencing anyway. Or mostly just legal costs as what their suit was worth was zilch in IP licencing.
 
system32 said:
Amazon migrated 5,000 databases with 50 petabytes of data to PostgreSQL.
The tools used are open source and available to Eskom.

Just requires some motivation and decent DBA skills.
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Amazon has how many internal software engineers again? It’s kinda part of their core business.. not quite the same for Eskom.

Granted SE is fast becoming a core competency in most industries.. for now it’s not at Eskom. So you have to be careful with those kind of things with 3rd party dev houses as it conversions are easy but the longer term cost grows fast and how money is made.
 
I would like to have a say on the amount of money initially claimed and why there was a revised amount stated.

I’m speaking from my experience at my company. I can’t say for certain this is what happened but I think that my experience is probably not unique in this life so here is my 2c.

You will probably find that some manager(s) heard in a meeting years ago that the client owes “them” an inordinate amount of money and if they can rectify that situation they can really make the a massive improvement to the company books.
Dumb manager only heard something about billions and that was all that stuck.
Meanwhile on the ground the minions are pushing to get money owed. The truth is somewhat different to what was said in the meeting and also remembered by the “management gods”.

What has probably happened is the following:

1. A number of orders were double booked. Some needed to canceled.

2. Some orders were booked but should have been canceled but weren’t. Trust me it happens and often it’s deliberately done to make the numbers look good. The issue is that the truth eventual comes out. Generally those okes guilty of this have left the company or were promoted and the fallout is someone else’s baby now.

3. The company believes that the client owes them money. But never invoiced for work done so the client hasn’t paid. or better yet never actually did the work.

4. The company invoiced the client but didn’t submit the supporting documentation for proof of delivery. (They probably also can’t prove that they performed the work either so now how does Eskom pay them?)

5. The client did not sign off on the invoices and proof of delivery.

6. The company is trying to charge massive license fees for expired product licenses but actually can’t substantiate the fees. (This I’m not too familiar with with but I suppose it’s like out of contract /bundle rates which are just obscene)

So all in all I assume the actual money owed is neither value. Probably the actual is between R300-150Mil
 
krycor said:
Amazon has how many internal software engineers again? It’s kinda part of their core business.. not quite the same for Eskom.

Granted SE is fast becoming a core competency in most industries.. for now it’s not at Eskom. So you have to be careful with those kind of things with 3rd party dev houses as it conversions are easy but the longer term cost grows fast and how money is made.
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FUD is keeping corporate from using opensource.
Coporates would rather pay a 3rd party (Oracle) instead of investing in own staff.

We've been using CentOS + PostgreSQL + OpenJDK since 2006 (Oracle "randomly" selected us for an audit).
Our biggest PostgreSQL database has over 130 billion (+130,000,000,000) rows of data.

Oracle claims it has been underpaid by R7.3 billion, but later reduced the amount owed by Eskom to R400 million. Eskom, however, only offered to pay R166 million.
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How many SE could Eskom could afford to have for R7.3 billion
 
system32 said:
FUD is keeping corporate from using opensource.
Coporates would rather pay a 3rd party (Oracle) instead of investing in own staff.

We've been using CentOS + PostgreSQL + OpenJDK since 2006 (Oracle "randomly" selected us for an audit).
Our biggest PostgreSQL database has over 130 billion (+130,000,000,000) rows of data.


How many SE could Eskom could afford to have for R7.3 billion
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Its not entirely FUD that stops corporates from using opensource, there is also a cost benefit analysis that is done on these things and risk assessment and in many cases it works out cheaper to pay for the Enterprise stuff that comes with support services so your own internal support staff don't need to be intimately educated in the workings of that product, as well as the companies own product.

I personally am all for a balance of opensource products and enterprise products in a corporate, but it needs to be based on a decent decision matrix taking into account the risk factors, the staffing and training overheads, and even the companies internal product requirements for uptime/resiliency/etc.
 
ToxicBunny said:
Its not entirely FUD that stops corporates from using opensource, there is also a cost benefit analysis that is done on these things and risk assessment and in many cases it works out cheaper to pay for the Enterprise stuff that comes with support services so your own internal support staff don't need to be intimately educated in the workings of that product, as well as the companies own product.

I personally am all for a balance of opensource products and enterprise products in a corporate, but it needs to be based on a decent decision matrix taking into account the risk factors, the staffing and training overheads, and even the companies internal product requirements for uptime/resiliency/etc.
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Yeah I hate custom solutions that end up not being supported or understood because companies end up with just the one guy who understands the system. Also if a company's job is making and selling electricity then that's what they should do. Let databases and other solutions be provided by companies whose job it is to make, sell and support those products.
 
Danie_V said:
Exactly the danger of any cloud contract! It certainly was in writing anyway so very clear to see if Oracle or Eskom is in the wrong. Thing is Eskom has not got a lot right the last few years so... It was the same with the Microsoft contracts when they arbitrarily changed the tariffs for MS SQL licensing - thing is they can, and you just have to pay up. Use open source instead I say.
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Who says it was a cloud contract? Oracle's on-prem software is notoriously expensive and ever-changing. Last time I checked you basically couldn't virtualise an Oracle DB server as the licensing costs meant you had to license every core of every CPU of every virtualisation host in a cluster.
Expensive to say the least.
Cloud contracts are water-tight and you have to know what you're getting into. If this was Oracle Cloud (no mention of it being that) then someone has let the resource usage escalate thinking it would simply go away. Kind of the status quo of working at Eskom right now. Their fault if they did.
 
JohnStarr said:
Who says it was a cloud contract? Oracle's on-prem software is notoriously expensive and ever-changing. Last time I checked you basically couldn't virtualise an Oracle DB server as the licensing costs meant you had to license every core of every CPU of every virtualisation host in a cluster.
Expensive to say the least.
Cloud contracts are water-tight and you have to know what you're getting into. If this was Oracle Cloud (no mention of it being that) then someone has let the resource usage escalate thinking it would simply go away. Kind of the status quo of working at Eskom right now. Their fault if they did.
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Oracle licensing has always been a ripoff. Nothing new. Fascinating is that people cannot wean themselves off it.
 
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