Why is Oracle worth $260B?

63 points by gagejustins 4 years ago | 21 comments

Hello everyone, author here. I wrote this post after wondering why Oracle is such a ubiquitous name, but almost no developers I've worked with have ever used it. After some research and conversations with a former employee, it turns out that the story is really interesting: Oracle was basically the first company to commercialize a RDBMS. And today they have what might be the fastest, most performant database at scale – if you're willing to pay for it.

hindsightbias 4 years ago | |

The intersection of HN and Enterprise developers on a venn diagram, anecdata aside, is not very large.

gregjor 4 years ago | | |

That’s putting it mildly. Developers who don’t know about Oracle and enterprise-scale databases are like car designers who haven’t heard of Ford.

This is why HN teems with NoSQL database nonsense and ideas like 100K rows is a scaling problem.

derwiki 4 years ago | |

IBM worked on an RDBMS in 1974, and Honeywell released a commercial RDBMS in 1976* before Oracle launched.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multics_Relational_Data_Store

gagejustins 4 years ago | | |

Weird, everything I've read said the contrary, e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/23/business/edgar-f-codd-79-...

gregjor 4 years ago | | |

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_F._Codd

samfitz 4 years ago |

We had lots of head to head competes with oracle when I was working at a rival big-tech company in sales. We would schedule a few calls, maybe send a salesperson on-site. Oracle would send 5-6 people across the country for an on-site discovery (seemingly, from an outside perspective) very often. They've always had a ton of resources and aren't afraid to use them, and are the pinnacle of old-school tech sales strategies.

reneeshah 4 years ago |

Which of the newer players are most likely to chip away at Oracle's market share?

gregjor 4 years ago | |

Oracle competes in the database realm with Microsoft (SQL Server) and IBM (DB/2). Oracle owns MySQL. PostgreSQL and MySQL are widely used but not considered enterprise-scale.

Big companies build their software around the database, so once they have committed to a database vendor they are pretty well locked in. I don’t see any newer players directly competing with Oracle, but there are always competing products aimed at specific requirements.

Besides the database server Oracle also sells enterprise software applications. So do Microsoft, IBM, HPE, etc. Salesforce (founded by a former Oracle exec) is an example of a new-ish competitor. Salesforce of course uses Oracle.

gagejustins 4 years ago | | |

I would also add: 1. new SQL entrants: PlanetScale, Cockroach 2. PaaS SQL: Spanner, Aurora

asmyers1793 4 years ago |

Oracle is the definition of a company that remains huge but hasn't done well offering cloud services, but has a stock that's up 153% over the past five years. Databases are sticky!

gregjor 4 years ago | |

Databases have more business value and stickiness than application code. A company may keep its Oracle database for decades while replacing application code multiple times.

lord_sudo 4 years ago |

Woah! I never realized that Oracle was such an aggressive company. I always thought they were just good ol' boring enterprise software business.

greenail 4 years ago |

I wonder what folks think of OCI? Does it have a chance to compete against AWS and M$ ?

gagejustins 4 years ago | |

From what I'm told, they've been pushing it very aggressively to existing customers, and growth has been slowing over the past few quarters. Pretty impressive all in all, given they had to start from scratch fairly recently

greenail 4 years ago | | |

sure, existing customer using OCI is a natural fit but why would an existing AWS or M$ customer move over there without any legacy?

borski 4 years ago |

As much as I hate Oracle, it is damn fast.

jwithington 4 years ago |

Is it because the discounted value of all future cash flows is $260B?

jaren 4 years ago |

Larry da big OG

yuppie_scum 4 years ago |

Oracle sucks.

zlwaterfield 4 years ago |

Damn