Sales practices In 1990, Oracle laid off 10% (about 400 people) of its work force because of accounting errors. This became a problem when the future sales subsequently failed to materialize. Oracle eventually had to restate its earnings twice, and also settled (out of court)
class-action lawsuits arising from its having overstated its earnings. Ellison stated in 1992 that Oracle had made "an incredible business mistake". Humphries described the cause ("building for years") as a combination of technical problems that benefited rivals, and the sales force using
side letters and other improper tactics to meet the company's longstanding goal of doubling revenue each year. Ellison hired ("bring in adults", Jerry Held said) new executives
Jeff Henley and
Raymond J. Lane, who helped the company recover from what Ken Jacobs later described as a "near death experience", in which Oracle required an investment from a Japanese steel company to meet payroll.
Competition The relational database industry was unusually concentrated. Besides being headquartered near each other in the
San Francisco Bay area, database technology experts attended the same universities and served on the same standards committees (with
Jim Gray serving as neutral arbiter as companies tried to get competing proposals enacted). Sales and marketing people were both fierce rivals and often moved between the companies, even as engineers socialized with each other. The smaller, later-founded database vendors viewed Oracle as their top enemy, with Bob MacDonald of
Informix Software calling Oracle "the
evil empire", while Humphries described his company as "the
Klingons of" the bay. Held later described his company's philosophy as "it's not good enough for Oracle to win. It was important for somebody else to lose".
Ingres was its first major competitor; Oracle's strategy of focusing on one opponent at a time. Even publicly complimenting other rivals "to take the pressure off", Held said, while effective, caused it to neglect
Sybase as a threat. Conversely, when Sybase had technical problems "it was: how do you put every ounce of product marketing, sales effort and focus on that".
IBM's endorsement of SQL in
Db2 in the early 1980s benefited Oracle and forced rivals like Ingres and
Informix Corporation to adopt SQL to compete. Oracle acknowledged IBM as the standard while emphasizing its own superiority, touting "total IBM SQL compatibility" while IBM's software ran "
only on IBM mainframes". By the mid-1980s the company described its database as "the last DBMS", bragging that Oracle now had larger database revenue than
dBASE maker
Ashton-Tate, and stating that Microsoft, Ashton-Tate, and Sybase's planned
Microsoft SQL Server "jumped on Oracle's SQL bandwagon". MacDonald credited Oracle with "being marketing oriented before any of the competitors ... pushing the envelope on selling the future way ahead of the rest of us". Stu Schuster of Sybase said "Larry taught us a lot about marketing". While other database companies' brochures emphasized technical features, Oracle advertisements showed an Oracle jet fighter shooting down Ashton-Tate and Borland biplanes; Larry Rowe of Ingres said "you could never come up with a strategy to beat Oracle because whatever you said today, two days later Ellison was saying it with more marketing dollars". Jacobs said, by contrast: The "benchmark wars" began in the early 1980s;
Roger Sippl of Informix said that when his company's product beat Oracle on 27 of 30
benchmarks, advertisements titled "Oracle wins again!" appeared citing the three it won, and Ellison allegedly called Dave DeWitt at the
University of Wisconsin after he developed a benchmark unfavorable to Oracle, threatening to get the professor fired. Schuster and Held recalled "a not very pleasant environment because it was so directly competitive". They and Sippl described "a vicious cycle" of companies battling each other over, for example, whose
distributed database had the best
two-phase commit: Even IBM participated in the "billboard wars". By 1995 Oracle had 44% of the $2.4 billion relational database market; Sybase had 17% and Informix had 16%. By 1996 Informix, after acquiring
Illustra, became Oracle's most important rival. The intense war between Informix CEO Phil White and Ellison made front-page news in
Silicon Valley for three years. Informix claimed that Oracle had hired away Informix engineers to disclose important trade secrets about an upcoming product. Informix finally dropped its lawsuit against Oracle in 1997. Held said In November 2005, a book detailing the war between Oracle and Informix was published, titled
The Real Story of Informix Software and Phil White. It gave a detailed chronology of the battle of Informix against Oracle, and how Informix Software's CEO Phil White landed in jail because of his obsession with overtaking Ellison. After what Held described as "the period of time where some of the wheels came off, first at Ingres then at Sybase, and then at Informix", Oracle was the only substantial independent database vendor until Microsoft SQL Server became widespread in the late 1990s and IBM acquired Informix Software in 2001 (to complement its Db2 database). Oracle has competed for new database licenses on UNIX, GNU, and Windows operating systems primarily against IBM's Db2 and Microsoft SQL Server. In 2004, Oracle's sales grew at a rate of 14.5% to $6.2 billion, giving it 41.3% and the top share of the relational-database market (
InformationWeek – March 2005), with market share estimated at up to 44.6% in 2005 by some sources. Oracle Corporation's main competitors in the database arena remain IBM Db2 and Microsoft SQL Server, and to a lesser extent Sybase and
Teradata, share of the market.
EnterpriseDB, based on PostgreSQL, has made inroads by proclaiming that its product delivers Oracle-compatible SQL and procedural language features at a much lower price-point. Oracle's main competitors in the database market include IBM and Microsoft, and in enterprise applications, SAP. On March 22, 2007,
Oracle sued SAP, accusing it of fraud and unfair competition. In the market for
business intelligence software, many other software companies, both small and large, have successfully competed in quality with Oracle and SAP products. Business intelligence vendors can be categorized into the "big four" consolidated BI firms such as Oracle, who has entered BI market through a recent trend of acquisitions (including
Hyperion Solutions), and the independent "pure play" vendors such as
MicroStrategy,
Actuate, and
SAS. Oracle Financials was ranked in the Top 20 Most Popular Accounting Software Infographic by Capterra in 2014, beating out SAP and a number of its other competitors.
Oracle and SAP From 1988, Oracle Corporation and the German company
SAP AG had a decade-long history of cooperation, beginning with the integration of SAP's
R/3 enterprise application suite with Oracle's relational database products. Despite the SAP partnership with Microsoft, and the increasing integration of SAP applications with Microsoft products (such as Microsoft SQL Server, a competitor to Oracle Database), Oracle and SAP continue their cooperation. According to Oracle Corporation, the majority of SAP's customers use Oracle databases. In 2004, Oracle began to increase its interest in the enterprise-applications market (in 1989, Oracle had already released Oracle Financials). A series of acquisitions by Oracle Corporation began, most notably with those of
PeopleSoft,
Siebel Systems, and
Hyperion. SAP recognized that Oracle had started to become a competitor in a market where SAP had the
leadership, and saw an opportunity to lure in customers from those companies that Oracle Corporation had acquired. SAP would offer those customers special discounts on the licenses for its enterprise applications. Oracle Corporation would resort to a similar strategy, by advising SAP customers to get "OFF SAP" (a play on the words of the
acronym for its middleware platform "Oracle Fusion for SAP"), and also by providing special discounts on licenses and services to SAP customers who chose Oracle Corporation products. Oracle and SAP (the latter through its recently acquired subsidiary
TomorrowNow) competed in the third-party enterprise software maintenance and support market. On March 22, 2007, Oracle filed a lawsuit against SAP. In
Oracle Corporation v. SAP AG Oracle alleged that TomorrowNow, which provides discount support for legacy Oracle product lines, used the accounts of former Oracle customers to systematically download patches and support documents from Oracle's website and to appropriate them for SAP's use. Some analysts have suggested the suit could form part of a strategy by Oracle Corporation to decrease competition with SAP in the market for third-party enterprise software maintenance and support. On July 3, 2007, SAP admitted that TomorrowNow employees had made "inappropriate downloads" from the Oracle support website. However, it claims that SAP personnel and SAP customers had no access to Oracle intellectual property via TomorrowNow. SAP's CEO
Henning Kagermann stated that "Even a single inappropriate download is unacceptable from my perspective. We regret very much that this occurred." Additionally, SAP announced that it had "instituted changes" in TomorrowNow's operational oversight. On November 23, 2010, a
U.S. district court jury in
Oakland, California, found that SAP AG must pay Oracle Corp $1.3 billion for copyright infringement, awarding damages that could be the largest-ever for copyright infringement. While admitting liability, SAP estimated the damages at no more than $40 million, while Oracle claimed that they are at least $1.65 billion. The awarded amount is one of the 10 or 20 largest jury verdicts in U.S. legal history. SAP said it was disappointed by the verdict and might appeal. On September 1, 2011, a federal judge overturned the judgment and offered a reduced amount or a new trial, calling Oracle's original award "grossly" excessive. Oracle chose a new trial. On August 3, 2012, SAP and Oracle agreed on a judgment for $306 million in damages, pending approval from the U.S. district court judge, "to save time and expense of [a] new trial". After the accord has been approved, Oracle can ask a federal appeals court to reinstate the earlier jury verdict. In addition to the damages payment, SAP has already paid Oracle $120 million for its legal fees.
Slogans • "Information driven" • For the Oracle Database: "Can't break it, can't break in" and "Unbreakable" • "Enabling the Information Age" • "Enabling the Information Age Through Network Computing" • : "The Information Company" • As of 2010: "Software. Hardware. Complete." • As of late 2010: "Hardware and Software, Engineered to Work Together" • As of mid 2015: "Integrated Cloud Applications and Platform Services" == Corporate affairs ==