Replacing Oracle

At my previous employer (Tideway Systems, now part of BMC Software) we did some work to help Oracle customers identify how much Oracle they were using. More specifically, Tideway automated some of the work involved in discovering what Oracle databases existed in a customer environment. People knowledgeable in Oracle licensing, like the fine folk at Rocela, use this information to identify opportunities to optimise the customer's use of Oracle and the way it is licensed.

Big Oracle customers have hundreds of Oracle databases and spend many millions per year on "maintenance" fees, so there are significant adjustments to be made simply by changing the way in which Oracle is being used and licensed. And Oracle's licensing is sufficiently complex (no doubt intentionally so) that companies such as Rocela can earn a living helping people navigate it.

It seems to me that there is a bigger opportunity here.

While I am prepared to accept that there are probably some applications that make full use of all of the bells and whistles that Oracle provides, I strongly suspect that in many of Oracle's largest customers, there are a significant number of applications which could be moved to an open source database - postgres, for example - without suffering an unacceptable hit in terms of performance or availability.

Simply in terms of avoiding the recurrent Oracle maintenance costs, this could be a huge cost saving.

Is anyone doing this? It looks like a good business opportunity to me. A services-led engagement to identify candidate applications, migrate them from Oracle to a lower cost alternative, then provide ongoing support would be a starting point. Longer term, how about developing tools to assist in the migration, or to remediate those applications that rely on Oracle-specific features?

If you know of examples of people doing this, I'd love to know about it.