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Comment by hyperpape | Hacker News Reader

1. They maintain and sell one of the largest relational databases.

2. They're the primary maintainer of one of the largest programming languages.

3. They do tons of HR/ERP type software.

4. They have a supply chain division (my company is a direct competitor, and we have 2000 employees--it's a drop in the bucket, but a few thousand here, a few thousand there and it starts to add up. Afaik, their supply chain org is bigger than ours).

5. Other things I probably don't know about.

Many of these things come with swarms of consultants who implement the software for companies that don't have any internal technical competency, which swells the number of workers by a lot.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not remotely a fan, I like to quote Bryan Cantrill's rant. However, they do a lot of things.

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>> Many of these things come with swarms of consultants who implement the software for companies that don't have any internal technical competency,

I have some anecdotal evidence for this. I worked at a medium sized family owned business. They were going through a massive ERP upgrade/replacement. One of the bids was from Oracle. The company was able to essentially test drive each company they were reviewing to see if the software was going to be a good fit.

Oracle's sales team was like a having a football on site. They sent over no less than about 20 people to swarm our pretty small office, barge into the dev spaces and generally annoy the fuck out of everybody for several months. The other vendors? They sent one, maybe two people to work alongside us as we test drove their software.

It was funny being in those meetings listening to people talk about the Oracle people. Nobody even remembered how good or bad their software was. Every single comment was about how overbearing and pushy their sales people were.

Needless to say, we went with a different company.

That sales process is directly tied to the type of customer they're aiming for, which is larger than a "medium-sized family-owned business".

They mis-aligned but for someone like Boeing or United, they'd go gaga over the footy-crowd.

They also own multiple other huge companies that had tens of thousands of their own employees working in completely different areas (Netsuite, Cerner, Acme, etc)

6. Lawyers

"The first thing we do, let's AI all the lawyers" ?

Also their cloud

And all the supporting legal team of course.

No better proof that they're a huge company than that I could forget about an entire public cloud offering. Good point.

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