As we are well into calendar Q4, several tech companies have announced layoffs and cutbacks as they prepare to weather inflation and the impending recession storm. Despite all the great news coming out of Oracle from their Q1 2023 report (announced September 12, 2022), they have been laying off employees throughout the course of 2022 on the heels of their Cerner acquisition in their quest to cut $1B in cost in the name of synergy. Somewhat surprising to us; however, is that they are also laying off from their OCI group (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure). Given their claims of robust cloud growth that they talk about to Wall Street in their Q1 ...
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Recently we sat down with Scott Braden, NET(net)’s SVP of Value Creation, to chat about his career, his Microsoft experience, working at NET(net) and the industry as a whole. Scott hails proudly from Texas and is a Texas A&M graduate who’s been working in the technology industry for over 30 years, the last fifteen of which have been with NET(net). In fact, Scott just celebrated his fifteenth year this month, so we thought it might be a great time to get his take on all things Microsoft and the tech industry. Question (Dexter Siglin, Chief Operating Officer, NET(net)) Wow, Scott – congratulations on celebrating fifteen years with ...
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No question Oracle is one of the most dominant and financially successful tech companies in the world. In fact, almost everyone reading this probably directly or indirectly owns a small part of Oracle in their investment portfolio. However, through sales practices, audit actions, acquisitions and never-ending lawsuits, Oracle seems to be relying increasingly on legal tactics and maneuvers to shut down competition and show growth to Wall Street, rather than be a disruptive innovator. Some would say that Oracle’s core competency now is litigation, not innovation. Ongoing War with Rimini Street We have long advocated for seeking alternatives in ...
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As discussed in some of our previous blogs, market indicators continued to show signs that a recessionary environment was on the horizon. Today, it became official wherein the U.S. recorded its second straight quarter GDP retraction. Preceding this news, were some unfortunate earnings reports coming from Fortune 100 companies (Walmart missed expectations on lowered forecasts). Firms are carrying unanticipated levels of inventory and are having to heavily discount to get rid of it, which are all harbingers of low growth, lower revenue and tighter margins. From our blog titled, “CEOs: #1 Action to Protect Your Organization from The Looming ...
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Inflation impacts the cost of nearly all your supplier agreements. Look closely at your IT agreements (especially your Cloud agreements). Even though the cost of technology goes down over time, and technology advancements make processes less manual, less error prone, less expensive, and more automated, many of your agreements still have antiquated clauses allowing your suppliers to *increase* your costs on an annual basis by an amount equal to the Consumer Price Index (CPI) amount, and generally include an accelerator above that amount; something like CPI + 3%, which would provide a contractual right of your supplier to increase your costs ...
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Clients often ask how we can stay on top of the market due to its constantly changing nature, and our answer is simple. We are constantly researching and analyzing the market in real-time, availing ourselves of a variety of resources. First among those is our own FMI (Federated Market Intelligence) gathered from thousands of executed deals since 2002. It’s a luxury to have that kind of data to inform Client strategy and optimization. However, we do also frequently vet our own understanding of the market by using a variety of resources, including the major Technology Review Platforms. If you can imagine, there are literally hundreds of ...
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Now that we are quickly approaching Oracle’s H1 fiscal end (Nov 30), the time is right to revisit Oracle behaviors that can impact your bottom line in ways you may not have thought of previously, or at least haven’t had to think about in a long time. With COVID-19, remote workforce issues, and the myriad of other distractions facing organizations now, it is easy to forget how we can slowly be taken advantage of by suppliers. One of these areas of concern is around the increased cost, hassle, disorganization, and general anger created by Oracle’s siloed sales team(s). With the multitude of competing interests from one company vying for your ...
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Unlike consumers who have been panic-buying bathroom paper products in bulk over the last few weeks, IT executives have prepared for security threats and natural disasters for many years and have deployed highly resilient solutions with varying degrees of business continuity. Clients have spent millions for things like network redundancy, contact center contingency planning, remote workforce support, and business application and underlying compute and storage infrastructure availability. The list could go on. In fact, there is a whole industry set up to help IT leaders face this business continuity challenge. What many of those plans fell ...
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What is a license exchange? A license exchange is a private market setup between you and Oracle, whereby you can ‘trade-in’ the list license value of software you no longer want or need for a list license value credit on new titles you do want. Why is it important? It’s important because absent this protection, it’s exceedingly difficult to get any value from software that you no longer want or need, and in many cases, it’s because the software didn’t work the way you thought it was going to work, or it didn’t provide the level of value you needed to justify its use. The other critical flaw in the Oracle approach to licensing management, is ...
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Underinvested? Overinvested? Do we have the right supplier(s)? Are we running the right software? Are we using the right security technology? Are our solutions keeping us safe and protected? Do we have applications and a network infrastructure that can be properly protected? These are the starting questions IT and Financial leaders of any organization face today when they look at the Equifax Security Breach – one the largest and deepest in US history. If you are unfamiliar or have chosen to forget it on purpose (apologies in advance if that’s the case), it impacted 140 million consumers’ personal information, including social security ...
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