VOSibilities

Many readers will remember a couple of years ago when Justice Antonin Scalia was caught giving “an obscene gesture” to reporters after getting a question he didn’t like.

Today, a lot of SAP and Oracle customers have got to be feeling like they’ve just been given that very gesture by SAP and Oracle, who have both substantially raised prices (here and here).

I guess that with the very big increases in the cost of transporting those very heavy license keys and object code across the Internet, Oracle and SAP felt they were justified in nailing customers’ budgets to the wall yet again.

Here at Active Endpoints, we wonder how long corporate users will permit themselves to be abused like this. And from what we hear from customers on a daily basis, it’s not just the pricing that’s obscene, the products themselves are unusable.

Just this morning, one of our sales guys told me he’d just spoken to a customer that had completely failed with the obese, impenetrable middleware that had been inflicted on him and who had, in desperation, tried ActiveVOS. This customer said he’d succeed with ActiveVOS without any training.

Let us help you get on a two-step program to recovery. First, figure out what it’ll cost you to use ActiveVOS. We publish our prices — which anybody can understand — right on our website. Step two: download ActiveVOS, try it, and see how much you can achieve with a fraction of the effort or pain compared to anything — and I mean anything  — else out there.

Go on…give the gesture back to Oracle, SAP and IBM. It’ll feel great. You’ll be 10 years younger, you’ll feel like a new man or woman…and your enterprise development capabilities will loose two tons of weight.

I expect that by now most everyone has seen the amazing film Wall-E in which a corporation called BNL — for “Big and Large” literally destroys Earth and emasculates humanity of its ability to survive on the planet.

Ryan Bagnulo of Aspect-i and I were talking about enterprises and their surprising tendency to remain with the status quo even when they should know better. And how that’s just fine with the big three — IBM, Oracle and SAP. Suddenly, Ryan said, “That’s kind of what happened in Wall-E!” At that point, I had to record the conversation for our listeners because it was so compelling a comparison.

That lead to this podcast in which Ryan and I discuss how IBM, SAP and Oracle are almost exactly like BNL and are quite content to let enterprises get so porked up on closed, proprietary application development software that they can’t get out of their chairs…to mix metaphors.

We hope you like the podcast, and as always, welcome your responses.

[After I posted this, I came across this broadside of SAP's pricing policies on Cnet. Need any more proof that these companies will suck the life out of enterprise application development buyers?]

 

 VOSibilities podcast #13: How IBM, SAP and Oracle could have been in "Wall-E" [7:49m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (71)