Other industry leaders see issues with Oracle’s in-memory offerings—namely, they may be too costly compared to third-party solutions. “While it’s great to see a company like Oracle finally addressing the need for real-time insight to help companies make better business decisions today, just adding in-memory options to a legacy database does not provide the same performance and speed benefits as native in-memory solutions do,” said Aaron Auld, CEO of Exasol. “Plus, both Oracle and SAP alike use hardware, which is difficult to describe as commodity—instead needing high-performance optimized hardware that is much more expensive and pushes price/performance ratios into the stratosphere. Instead of relying on patching up old solutions or leaning on expensive hardware to deliver performance, it’s time companies seeking performance started taking a hard look at upstart in-memory analytical databases.”
While Oracle has made a number of acquisitions that promise to boost the vendor into these newer high-performance spaces, there have been additional issues as well. For example, Probstein points to Oracle’s Endeca acquisition as an example where things don’t quite turn out as planned. “The company is more than a decade old, was acquired just a few years ago, and most of the key staff have moved on,” said Probstein. “Who is going to drive Endeca’s products forward and integrate them with other Oracle offerings? The answer is nobody. It won’t ever happen. That’s why you still have to pre-join all the data, Endeca itself doesn’t do SQL or joins, and also you’ll have to send your data to multiple Oracle platforms and handle all the coherence between them yourself, assuming you didn’t only need Endeca.”
Still, others in the industry believe that Oracle is very effectively keeping pace with the demands of today’s data-driven enterprises. Bob Braham, CMO at SGI, cites Oracle’s enhancement of Oracle Marketing Cloud from its acquisitions of Responsys and Eloqua. “By providing cloud-based offerings, Oracle has made its technology available to mid-sized companies who can’t afford the extensive infrastructure, implementation, and personnel costs,” he states. “Many of these companies have significant customer databases that benefit from Oracle’s technology that allows users to better segment and target customers, and create more relevant and compelling campaigns. Oracle has provided a disruptive capability that will give clients greater choice.”