Gabriel Consulting Unveils Key Findings of New Oracle Survey

Majority say opinion of Oracle has changed for the worse; negative view of company at 72%

BEAVERTON, Oregon May 5, 2011 — Gabriel Consulting Group (GCG), an independent analyst firm, today released more key findings from its “What’s Up With Oracle?” survey, which is focused on Oracle’s recent decision to discontinue porting new versions of its software to Intel’s Itanium processor. The survey was conducted among enterprise IT professionals responsible for data centers of all sizes. There are 450 respondents; 94% are current Oracle customers.

Survey results released today cover the sections of the survey in which customers are asked whether their opinion of Oracle has changed over time, primarily since Oracle’s purchase of Sun Microsystems. On a question phrased, “Have any of Oracle’s recent actions or statements changed your opinion of the company? If so, how?” results include:

  • 65% said that their opinion of Oracle has changed for the worse.
  • 27% said their opinion is unchanged or hasn’t changed in a negative way; an additional 6% weren’t sure.

o   However, 20% of the ‘Opinion of Oracle unchanged’ group and 15% of the ‘Not sure’ group indicated in qualitative responses that their opinion of Oracle hasn’t changed because it’s always been negative, and that Oracle has continued to reinforce these beliefs.

  • Overall, 72% expressed a negative view of Oracle.

“It’s normal for customers to “not like” or distrust their vendors to a certain extent. When a vendor is important to your business, it’s often a love-hate relationship,” said Dan Olds, Principal Analyst at GCG. “But the antipathy towards Oracle is way beyond that. Customers don’t believe that Oracle has their best interests at heart or cares about anything other than wringing maximum profits out of a captive installed base.”

Other questions in this section of the survey looked at customer satisfaction levels with major Oracle product lines. For each product, customers could select ‘Happy – not looking,’  ‘Not totally comfortable,’  ‘Evaluating alternatives,’ or ‘Definitely migrating away.’ Key survey results include:

  • Half of customers using Oracle’s JD Edwards enterprise management software were happy with the package and not shopping for substitutes.
  • 47% of PeopleSoft and 39% of Siebel customers were currently happy with those solutions.
  • 38% of Oracle Applications users reported they weren’t looking, but 37% said they were either evaluating alternatives (28%) or in the process of migrating away (9%).
  • On Oracle’s flagship database product, 39% were happy, but 32% were actively evaluating substitutes and an additional 7% have decided to drop the product.
  • 51% of Oracle’s operating system customers (Solaris, Solaris64 and Oracle Enterprise Linux) said they either were looking at alternatives (25%) or have decided to drop these platforms (26%).

“The amount of weakness in Oracle’s mainline software products is troubling. We were expecting to see higher customer satisfaction numbers on their software products,” said Olds. “We weren’t surprised by the low ratings on their operating systems. Past and upcoming research we’ve conducted on the relative strength of major hardware vendors has shown us that Oracle’s hardware offerings, and Oracle as a hardware vendor, has a difficult time competing against Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Dell.”

The survey also found early indications that customers using Oracle software packages on Hewlett-Packard’s Itanium-based systems won’t be migrating those workloads onto Oracle-owned platforms. Virtually none of these respondents said they anticipated moving Oracle software onto a Solaris or Oracle Linux-based system.

According to Olds, “By dropping Itanium, Oracle might have thought that they could reasonably expect to see some of those workloads land on new Oracle hardware in the near future. From what we’re seeing, this just isn’t going to happen in any significant way. Right now, customers are almost universally rejecting that alternative, and many have indicated that they’re going to migrate away from Oracle – which is just the opposite of what Oracle wants to see coming out of this.”

GCG will be releasing more findings in the next few weeks. More information and detailed results are available here. Visit GCG on Facebook and follow Dan Olds on Twitter @danolds.

About Gabriel Consulting Group

Gabriel Consulting Group is a research, analysis, and consulting firm dedicated to helping clients achieve maximum return on their Information Technology investment.

###

Contact: Dan Olds

503-372-9389 Office

503-730-5072 Mobile

gcginfo@GabrielConsultingGroup.com

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>