I can confirm this. Oracle goes out of their way to make senior and upper-mid management feel like rockstars. All expenses paid meetings in attractive overseas destinations, start to finish hand holding on multi-million dollar engagements, regular contact and personal attention. Management swoon and sign the cheques. And why wouldn't they? After all, it's only the company's money, not theirs personally.
Why? This is basically how the business world operates. There is nothing wrong with a private business wining and dining a potential client to swoon and sell them something.
You will be investigating likes of Microsoft, IBM, and even Amazon.
As an example, I can't stop the CIO and board at my company from talking about the cloud because of all the consultants and sales guys talking to the C suite. You want to see something really oversold right now look no further than the cloud.
'Wining and dining' is very common, but it's not necessarily considered 'corruption' because a meal is well, just a meal, after all. The occasional tickets etc. are just a 'gift' not ostensibly supposed to interfere with the purchasing decision.
Of course they do on some level.
But it's a fine line.
It's crazy how many CEO's will let purchasing decision makers be taken on these things and junkets, I would just not allow it.
But also don't doubt the ability of people to just drink koolaid. There are tons of non-thinkers out there who just 'buy' the story presented to them.
Also - I don't think 'the cloud' is oversold. It's definitely the future, and it's going to be the 'new normal' and it's here to stay.
The notion that anyone would 'host their own' stuff just doesn't make sense anymore - unless there are specific reasons for it. 'The cloud' is now the 'default choice' for most things, unless you have a need not to use it.
I never said the "wining and dining" was illegal or corrupt. I just think it is a easy way to get decision makers to push the people under them to look at technologies that may or may not apply.
In the case of the cloud, I agree that there's a future for it. But I think in the future people are going to look around and notice that it cost a lot of money to run everything in the cloud and on-premise is going to start looking good again.
