7 ms·

Oracle had an ad business?

by JacobHenner 2y ago

tanelpoder 2y ago
Reminds me of the IBM Cloud slogan: "We have a cloud?!" I think it was @quinnypig who coined it...
- refulgentis 2y ago
  @quinnypig's tone[1] wears on me a bit. I don't mean that in judgement, we all suffer from followers disease[2]. I just don't like the effort of having to parse through the tone of everything to figure out what's actually going on. For instance, here, the original B2B tech company, still turning over billions upon billions, wouldn't provide the base unit of B2B tech? Really? Interrobang of surprise at that? I don't think so. You'd have to be very young and made 0 effort into ex. checking IBM's business metrics over the course of your lifetime. [1] my current standard for this is "how long would you feel people were talking about your efforts accurately, if they talked the same way you do?" -- standards are leaky and hard to word. [2] The Algorithm has multiple tentacles, you end optimizing for your most engaging behavior
- sidewndr46 2y ago
  I figured the IBM slogan would be something like "We have a product people actually want to buy?"
- Gigachad 2y ago
  Oracle cloud has the most generous free tier ever. I've got a 24GB ram VPS on it that I have run a minecraft server on for the last year. Never paid a dollar for it.
  - ralphc 2y ago
    Did you have to put up a credit card for it?
    - _lvbh 2y ago
      Yes, and they’re notorious for rejecting credit cards. They can also shut down your machines at any time if paying users want more capacity. I moved off after they killed my machine and caused me to lose a bunch of data because I couldn’t spin up another (capacity full)
mtillman 2y ago
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 2y ago
  How Oracle is able to survive these days? I guess the moat of Oracle DB?
  - munk-a 2y ago
    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.
  - cool_dude85 2y ago
    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 2y ago
    They sell to execs, not to developers, and they have a lot of certifications and assurances that make them "low risk" to that audience.
  - skissane 2y ago
    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
johannes1234321 2y ago
Isn't it core of ad tech, that average public doesn't know who got their data?
tcmart14 2y ago
Not gonna lie, I honestly have the same reaction.
Matsta 2y ago
We use Oracle's Grapeshot (they acquired them in 2018) which is a solid platform for audience targeting and brand safety for ads. The product is still working since the news broke this week, and my assumption is they are going to try and sell it on as it's still a solid product and performs wells and brings us nice ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)

Oracle had an ad business?

tanelpoder 2y ago

Reminds me of the IBM Cloud slogan: "We have a cloud?!" I think it was @quinnypig who coined it...

refulgentis 2y ago
@quinnypig's tone[1] wears on me a bit. I don't mean that in judgement, we all suffer from followers disease[2]. I just don't like the effort of having to parse through the tone of everything to figure out what's actually going on. For instance, here, the original B2B tech company, still turning over billions upon billions, wouldn't provide the base unit of B2B tech? Really? Interrobang of surprise at that? I don't think so. You'd have to be very young and made 0 effort into ex. checking IBM's business metrics over the course of your lifetime. [1] my current standard for this is "how long would you feel people were talking about your efforts accurately, if they talked the same way you do?" -- standards are leaky and hard to word. [2] The Algorithm has multiple tentacles, you end optimizing for your most engaging behavior
sidewndr46 2y ago
I figured the IBM slogan would be something like "We have a product people actually want to buy?"
Gigachad 2y ago
Oracle cloud has the most generous free tier ever. I've got a 24GB ram VPS on it that I have run a minecraft server on for the last year. Never paid a dollar for it.
- ralphc 2y ago
  Did you have to put up a credit card for it?
  - _lvbh 2y ago
    Yes, and they’re notorious for rejecting credit cards. They can also shut down your machines at any time if paying users want more capacity. I moved off after they killed my machine and caused me to lose a bunch of data because I couldn’t spin up another (capacity full)

mtillman 2y ago

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 2y ago
How Oracle is able to survive these days? I guess the moat of Oracle DB?
- munk-a 2y ago
  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.
- cool_dude85 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  They sell to execs, not to developers, and they have a lot of certifications and assurances that make them "low risk" to that audience.
- skissane 2y ago
  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

johannes1234321 2y ago

Isn't it core of ad tech, that average public doesn't know who got their data?

tcmart14 2y ago

Not gonna lie, I honestly have the same reaction.

Matsta 2y ago

We use Oracle's Grapeshot (they acquired them in 2018) which is a solid platform for audience targeting and brand safety for ads. The product is still working since the news broke this week, and my assumption is they are going to try and sell it on as it's still a solid product and performs wells and brings us nice ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)