Things are a little better these days where you can often find apps (usually SaaS) that fill a specific need very well, but then you're usually stuck managing a dozen different products and a massively more difficult integration between all of them.
If you're using Oracle to power a home-grown system though, yeah: With a little effort you can swap the backend for something where the vendor won't show up with a surprise multi-$million invoice along with pre-made lawsuit papers if you don't sign it.
What really happens is entirely different. Oracle takes the request, foots the bill for an army of contractors to build it, if they haven’t already, and pass it off as we had it the whole time, just like we said.
Then up charge. Shake down street. Lock in.
I’m sure not all of Oracle operates this way, but that’s been my experience.
Homegrown systems are an easy low-hanging fruit to cost reduction.
Software to tackle the BPaaS on top of an Oracle add-on service, requires a pitch deck.
That must be what happened in my case! I didn't realize it was a standard practice. A large part of the lawsuit revolved around functionality the RFP required, Oracle said they had, and that Oracle even showed in what may have been faked screenshots during our review of vendors. Only in our case, the army of developers never actually finished it and Oracle came back to us with another massive bill to complete the project.
I'm not sure I've ever heard someone who's worked with Oracle who didn't have a bad experience. But if you have and you're reading this, just drop a quick comment to say "yeah, they were okay"
There was a complaining faction in my org, mostly disgruntled hold-outs from before my tenure. Whatever complaint they thought they had, I could bring it to our account manager, and it was pretty easy to see the root of the problem came from personal issues in staff, and insecurity with changing to better technology that they were not experts in.
Now that I've got mostly oracle certified engineers and oracle familiar managers on board I don't hear any complaints. It's a great product, and in all my future roles, transitioning to Oracle is one of the first things I'll do when I get on board.