They call themselves the Enterprise Advocates. But the bloggers that have been attacking Oracle's (ORCL) and SAP's (SAP) enterprise software maintenance policies and prices for the last few years remind me more of the information technology (IT) industry's equivalent of the U.S. political movement known as the Tea Baggers. That's meant as a compliment.
So predictably Vinni and Frank (see January 26 post) are up in arms over mammoth Oracle's legal action against little Rimini Street. In my quick reading of the January 25 Oracle complaint, and as many newstories have pointed out, it looks like a cut and paste of the Oracle 2007 allegations against SAP related to SAP's now inactive TomorrowNow subsidiary. (Be careful in downloading a .pdf copy of the legal document; I think there is a spyware/virus/ID-theft thing in process on the Internet--unrelated to Oracle and Rimini Street--based on Adobe's reader.)
Not coincidentally the founder of TomorrowNow, the guy who sold it to SAP, then went on to found Rimini. Also, as with the SAP action, this has more to do with Oracle's acquired PeopleSoft, JDE and Siebel brands as opposed to its own legacy enterprise applications. Neither SAP nor Rimini Street seem to disagree with Oracle's allegation that they downlaoded a lot of Oracle intellectual property (IP) off of Oracle's support web site. The question in both cases seems to be centered around whether Rimini figured out a legal way to download the IP, one supposedly tied to the fact that Rimini is acting as an agent of its customer (who is of course also Oracle's customer). Given that SAP is apparently trying valiantly to settle out of court, it seems to think TomorrowNow was not acting legally.
I think the legal firm representing Oracle is the same one representing SCO. So happily this will all keep Groklaw in business for a while to come.
However the big picture from an IT investment perspective -- despite Vinni's excellent analogy between automotive diagnostics and IT diagnostics -- is that the typical enterprise software support contract is about content, not bug fixes or a phone number to call. What most enterprise-application users want and need in a so-called maintenance contract is the updated tax tables every December 31, timely software updates that reflect the forever changing government personnel and environmental/workplace regulations, and so forth.
What Oracle appears to be saying about Rimini Street (which didn't apply to SAP however) is that this little company cannot possibly deliver all that it promises at half the price that Oracle charges without a shortcut via allegedly illegally obtaining the work Oracle has already done.
What this says about the bigger picture of the third-party software maintenance market outlook however is "How many ways can you write a payroll program?" (For us sixty-somethings, check printing was the Hello World of learning COBOL.)
-- Dennis Byron
Dennis, thanks for the post and link.
FYI, the US political movement you mention is the "Tea Party" movement. "Tea baggers" is a derogatory term used by opponents of that movement.
(Dennis reply: sorry about that! Glad I was specific that I considered my comment a compliment :)
Posted by: Frank Scavo | January 27, 2010 at 10:08 AM