Oracle's Sales Dept

This is verbatim from a letter I sent to Oracle marketing :

Your company salespeople won't even issue quotes? This is just too frustrating. Here is my story :

It was in the middle of June when I'd first contacted Oracle for a database server. I was assigned to John Pola, a regional salesperson for my locale. Apparently, Oracle only sells through a regional hierarchical network.

My organization was about to order Oracle Server, 5 user (for NT) for development of a rather large (at least 1600 separate deployments throughout the 50 states and {SNIPPED}) project.

The project required abstract-data type and object capability from within the database, and I knew, from other projects around the country, that Oracle8 supported this.

This was all explained to my regional salesperson, who said that a 5-user Oracle8 Server, would be sufficient for the development phase. My regional salesperson faxed me a quote and wanted to talk with my supervisor.

He even sent me white papers that explicitly say that Oracle8 Server supports Abstract Data Types (ADTs) & Objects. That was back in June & July.

Over the weekend, from other people, I learned that ONLY Oracle8 Enterprise has support for ADTs & objects. Unfortunately, I think that the Enterprise version costs around $10,000 (US) which is about seven times more expensive than the server edition.

That part is bad enough, but it gets a lot worse. Apparently I can't even get a price on the Enterprise edition because your regional salesperson had to scratch a quote and couldn't contact my boss to get more confidential information about the project I'm working on.

This project absolutely requires an object database, and my familiarity and preference made Oracle a perfect fit for this project. But because of this company policy of yours, it is rather likely that we will have to use a competitors product ( I don't even know which one - because we all though we'd be using Oracle ).

Cordially,
Timothy Little...

-----== Posted via Deja News, The Leader in Internet Discussion ==----- http://www.dejanews.com/rg_mkgrp.xp Create Your Own Free Member Forum Received on Mon Aug 31 1998 - 12:00:29 CDT