[mtillman]

They bought a ton of adtech companies (primarily data providers) in the 2010ish range. As one of my former colleagues said, "the lawyers at Oracle considered cookies to be on-prem software" which says a lot about Oracle's view of advertising. If you're really successful, you either become a media company, a bank, or a consulting firm. Oracle is firmly #3 while companies like Apple figured out how to become a media company and a bank. Though it's a little early to claim "figure out" I suppose.

[chucke1992]

How Oracle is able to survive these days? I guess the moat of Oracle DB?

[skissane]

Mostly due to acquisitions, they own a huge range of business applications, both generic (such as Peoplesoft and NetSuite) and industry-specific (e.g. Cerner in healthcare). These kinds of apps tend to have high lock-in: once your business is running on one or more of them, migrating to something else can be an expensive megaproject.

Also, historically they had a big push for their apps to use their own tech products (DB and middleware), so the tech side of the business benefited from the apps side. Although, I remember when I worked there (6+ years ago), they were trying to move away from that somewhat, and cloud apps teams in particular were being given more freedom to use whatever technology they thought was best for their product rather than forced to adopt Oracle Whatever. Plus, acquired products run on all kinds of different tech stacks, since (at least my personal impression was) the tech stack wasn’t a huge concern in deciding what to acquire

[sidewndr46]

Even my power bill is generated by a platform called OPower. The O stands for Oracle as far as I can tell

[skissane]

> The O stands for Oracle as far as I can tell

It doesn't. Opower was founded, under that name, in 2007. Oracle acquired it in 2016. Any suggestions the O in its name stands for "Oracle" are a retcon founded on a coincidence

[cool_dude85]

I think they offer a lot of niche-market products that all sort of work together as a "suite" with the core product of course the db. I work in the utility industry and they are present everywhere.

Of the products I'm immediately aware of, they have a billing data system, a meter data system, and an enterprise asset management system. They try to sell upper management that all components work together easily, and because IT is not our core business, this is an enticing pitch to the chief level audience.

[jl6]

They sell to execs, not to developers, and they have a lot of certifications and assurances that make them "low risk" to that audience.

[munk-a]

Consulting fees for said DB and escalating DB licensing costs. They have an atrocious reputation and I'm honestly amazed they invest as little into training sessions/cold call advertising as they do.