Oracle Customers Rail About Costs, Services, Maintenance

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Customers
with legacy J.D. Edwards and PeopleSoft applications have some big decisions to
make about Oracle Fusion in the coming year, and many of them will be looking
beyond the enterprise software giant out of feelings of frustration and lockdown,
according to a new Computer Economics report titled "Go Forward Strategies for Oracle Application
Customers."

Ironically,
customers who are most frustrated with Oracle’s licensing and support practices
contend they will keep with or
even invest more
with the company. Roughly 58 percent of Oracle clients in this
report say they are frustrated; Yet, 37 percent say they are planning to invest more in Oracle
products in the next three years.

What
choice do some of these companies have? It depends on which applications and
technologies you are speaking about, says Frank Scavo, president of Computer
Economics, in an interview with CIO Insight sister publication eWEEK.

"Hardware
and even databases are easier to migrate, but vendor lockdown for application
software is not easy to change," said Scavo in a November 19 phone interview.
"The heart of OracleÂ’s business is the maintenance business … Oracle has
publicly said it makes 90 percent margins in maintenance."

At
issue aren’t just the maintenance costs, but also how maintenance is
bundled with future upgrades of the software. To get those upgrades, you have
to buy maintenance, said Scavo, who made a point of saying that this is not
unique to Oracle. Most enterprise software vendors practice this upgrade
product strategy.

For more, read the eWeek article Oracle Customers Reveal Angst on Costs, Services, Maintenance.

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