Oracle Accused of Being a “Shameless Truth-Bender”
Ryan Tate claims that “Larry Ellison will always be a shameless truth-bender” in an article titled Larry Ellison Can’t Be Bothered With the Facts. The article talks about an advertisement that appeared recently in the Wall Street Journal and goes on to share some interesting anecdotes about Oracle advertising.
The advertisement in question suggests that Oracle plan to announce a new TPC-C result using Sun hardware on October 14. One thing this article does not mention is that, as far as I can tell, the advertisement does not follow the TPC rules. If you read Section 8.2.2 Unfair Use, you will see that Oracle could be interpreted to have violated several of these rules and unfairly used the TPC benchmark. You see, the TPC does not allow organizations to “make TPC-related claims or lead the reader to TPC-related conclusions which are untrue or cannot be substantiated by the entire body of results.” TPC does this to prevent misleading advertising. You may wonder how this could be misleading. Well, it could be misleading because it does not tell the full story. For instance, what if their upcoming benchmark result requires an inordinately expensive hardware configuration. Without certain primary metrics, TPC results cannot reasonably be compared.
Aside from Oracle’s apparent flaunting of the TPC rules, this advertisement is also notable because Oracle indicates that the upcoming TPC result will be on Sun hardware. The reason that this is interesting is that Sun has publicly derided the TPC-C benchmark in the past. In fact, they have not participated in the TPC-C benchmarks for several years, claiming that the benchmark does not reflect real world transactional workloads, and that the benchmark is easily gamed by vendors. It is an interesting about-face for Sun. I wonder what prompted this change in what was a very firm stance on their part.
Conor,
you might moan about those Oracle tactics, but fact is that, unlike IBM, Oracle is investing money in advertising their database. This creates product awareness in the marketplace. Product awareness helps their partners to sell their Oracle based products. The same is true for Microsoft and their SQL Server.
IBM instead invests the money in a meaningless “Smarter Planet” campaign which doesn’t create any product awareness and hence doesn’t help their partners to sell their DB2 or IDS based solutions.
I’m not an Oracle fan, but I think that they have a far more clever and focused marketing than IBM has. IBM just markets their name which might be good for IBM but doesn’t help their partners to sell their solutions.
I would be happy to see clever product focused advertising campaigns from IBM. That would help us as IBM partners much more than this “Smarter Planet” crap.
While IBM has smart products – at least IDS is a very smart product – it doesn’t have a smart marketing, Oracle is probably the other way round
Dolefully but true.
Eric Herber
September 10, 2009 at 3:26 am
UPDATE: It appears that Oracle did indeed violate the TPC policies. The TPC have issued a press release at Transaction Processing Performance Council Reprimands Oracle Corporation for Violations of the TPC’s Fair Use Policies.
Conor O'Mahony
September 30, 2009 at 5:59 am
There r 24 rules mentioned in TCP fair rule policies
harry
October 31, 2009 at 12:48 am
thanks Mr Conor. it was a nice exposure you did of oracle for the kind of fraudulent and inappropriate claims they have put across about their databases.
Advertising is necessary but that would not mean you put across several untrue claims to make a customer gullible to buy your product. Really good post mate… Joel
Joel ellegood
October 31, 2009 at 7:45 am
Mr Conor-First of all, I’m quite impressed that IBM allows so many employees to blog without reprisal which is certainly a good precedent to have in any industry. It is a strange bit of news overall, but the thing is that almost no advertising (I’ll leave Toyota out of this) is bad. Oracle is going to gain market share by doing this, even if it only happens because they aren’t following the rules. Personally, not a company I’d want to work for.
Mark's cheap wine club
February 25, 2010 at 6:10 pm