Executive Summary

  • Oracle has the most aggressive sales model in enterprise software, and it is highly negative for its customers.
  • We refer to the Oracle Sales Model to describe problematic sales in other vendors.

The Oracle Software Sales Model

Oracle maintains a hyper-aggressive and deeply embedded software sales culture of factual misrepresentation, which unfortunately infects other enterprise software vendors, particularly those in the Bay Area, where so many of the world’s software vendors are located.

This Oracle software sales culture returns to the company’s origins and is a more critical contribution to enterprise software than any product it has ever developed. If Oracle had not developed its database, other software vendors were there to take on the growth that Oracle enjoyed. However, its culture has affected the entire industry.

The History Oracle

If one looks at the history of Oracle, while there were some early innovations in database design, Oracle was never actually the technology leader in databases – but it was the marketing leader. Oracle had a brief period of innovation decades ago and has based most of its success on hard-nosed tactics, cheating, account control, and monopolistic practices.

Many of these Oracle salespeople infuse the Oracle culture into new companies they move to. The dissatisfaction by employees in our interviews that can be traced to Oracle hires is genuinely breathtaking, which is why we created this definition. And why we consider hiring many ex-Oracle employees into a new software vendor to be a sign of a software vendor’s decline.

  • We have repeatedly used Oracle as an example of why a company was moving to a more “flexible” model of truth on its sales information and the logic that “it worked for Oracle.”
  • In repeated reviews with software vendors, we have found that some Oracle hires from Oracle’s notorious sales division have entirely changed the internal culture of lying and politics. This is similar to what happened after Enron went bankrupt, and Enron salespeople began to infect other companies.

Oracle Software Sales as Shorthand

Companies ranging from SAP to IBM also employ a similar software sales culture. However, as Oracle is considered the worst practitioner and immediately recognizable as dishonest sales in the software industry, the “Oracle Sales Model” is an excellent shorthand for underhanded software sales practices. Now, are all salespeople who work for Oracle evil? No. I have friends who worked for Oracle in sales; some tried to go against the culture and look for a customer partnership. But most Oracle salespeople do not act that way.

Oracle Training for SalesPeople

Part of this is due to institutional incentives and Oracle training. Oracle salespeople have to undergo Oracle training, which teaches them to behave and act in specific ways Oracle desires.