What if companies say: “help me move away from Oracle”?

I hear this aspiration from a growing number of organizations. Sometimes as a quite literal question. This however is merely half of a wish. Apparently, organizations want to quite with one thing — but have not yet stipulated what they desire instead. What is the objective that is pursued here? Only to get rid of Oracle?

And what is even meant by Oracle? Oracle has a broad product portfolio and is of course also a company, a business relationship. Should all products be removed and all ties with the Oracle company severed? Does the person asking to be helped even know what their company is using from that supplier? Is there a business case for such an operation, which obviously requires considerable costs, efforts, and risks? And as with every question I get asked as architect, I have to understand the background and real purpose of a request and so we ask the ‘power question’: why??

Together with four peers from partners of AMIS in the Red Expert Alliance, I have written an article to explore where the desire to move away from Oracle might come from. We describe what the term Oracle represents — more than 2.000 products on all layers in the technology stack and in different business areas. And we map out what the ‘moving away from’ consists of: defining where you ‘move to’ and subsequently actually going there.

It will become clear why should you give a considerable thought about dropping Oracle, or any other vendors’ technology, when you’re not pleased with your current IT situation. You need to focus on the actual problems and objectives and define the suitable roadmap to fit your real needs.

This article was written by José Rodrigues (Link Consulting, Portugal), Arturo Viveros (Sysco, Norway), Sven Bernhardt (OPITZ CONSULTING, Germany), Rolando Carrasco (SPS, Mexico) and me (Lucas Jellema (AMIS|Conclusion, The Netherlands)). You can read the full article on Medium.

Please feel free to add your comments or reach out to discuss your thoughts and questions.