The government. The government has been funding Oracle from the start, and it's never stopped. Who do you think the NSA and CIA use for all of their data storage and warehousing? It was the FBI that started this mess, and it's the rest of the government that continues it. Ellison often comes off as untouchable in this stories, and that's because he is. He made it possible for the spooks to build "Echelon" 30 years ago. God knows what that's morphed into now. He's a hero to them.

Yes, I'm being purposely sardonic, but only a little.

We know what echelon morphed into. Much of it was in the Snowden docs. If you are highly technical it’s not hard to imagine a few steps forward from what was in that release and realize just how massive the infrastructure and internet vacuum is.

Good point. More specifically, I was thinking about the supposed "acres" of underground computers that was slurping up phone call data when the program was discovered. I wonder how much storage and equipment it all takes now.

Railroad Lake, Henderson, NV

> too deep into the Oracle ecosystem to go anywhere else

This is certainly part of it. I read something around the time of a quarterly earnings report recently that spoke about how OCI revenue was increasing rapidly, but was doing so by cannibalizing traditional revenue sources.

Mostly those. I have worked with organizations who are so deep in the Oracle quagmire that migration is next to impossible. Everything is Oracle in these firms.

high paying multi million dollar companies https://cloud.oracle.com/en_US/iaas/customers

Interesting that few of those are tech companies. For comparison, AWS's list is mostly tech companies: https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/

I know a CIO of a large private company (billions revenue) that has an associates in business mgmt and was promoted from within. Excellent people skills and a good golf game. There's no way they can recruit a competent and empowered IT team so a good sales team makes the decisions. Outside of tech companies, I have no doubt that this is the norm.