Oracle Not Budging on Maintenance Fees
It has become a regular ritual during Oracle's quarterly earnings conference calls. Company executives point to the vendor's lucrative revenue stream from maintenance -- paid annually by customers as a percentage of their license fees -- and bask in the approving glow of the financial analysts on the line.
Zebra Technologies has adopted Oracle widely, moving away from a previous strategy that employed a lot of custom development and a legacy ERP (enterprise resource planning) system.
The Lincolnshire, Illinois, printing and labeling company now has an enterprisewide license agreement with Oracle, and has hired "key people" to work in-house instead of paying outside consultants, said Jeffrey Hand, director of IT.
As a result, from an integration standpoint, Zebra is saving about 60 percent over the old model, he said: "We're getting out of the software business."
Wind River Systems, which sells products and services for optimizing device software, is planning to buy Oracle BI (business intelligence) software to run against its financials application, said vice president and CIO Scott Fenton.
While he has "been very successful" at garnering significant license discounts from the vendor, Fenton takes the cost of maintenance in stride.
"Paying maintenance is like getting a tuneup on your car," he said. "Oracle is top-notch. It's best-in-class support. It's a valuable service and part of doing business."
