Pinned straw:
I wanted to avoid posting on Prophecy and I know this will be a very unpopular low vote post and damage my ranking.
But I can't help myself again!
These slides just screams "Buy Oracle" even if it is $100+ USD and you need to fill in that WB form to receive the quarterly dividends to ensure you are not taxed too much.
There is also a partnership fee when joining the Oracle Partner Network. I know as the company I work for is part of the OPN.
On top of that, there are ongoing certification fees and certification expires after 2 years. - but of course you have a choice to do it once and not do it again.
Then of course there's commissions etc... to Oracle for being a partner which cuts into the margins.
On the move to Oracle Cloud I have a feel this will cost quite a bit and need new hires to maintain emite and Snare on Oracle Clloud Infrastructure. Hence the mention about the hosting cost. Hopefully for shareholders the containers before the move were running latest versions so it would be less labour intensive. Prophecy had no choice because it is obvious that some of their government and NGO clients are making the move to Oracle Cloud. This is why it makes more sense to buy Oracle shares instead.
I could get into more detail on Virtual container image maintenance etc.. on OCI but that will be beyond the scope of this post and will just confuse everyone more. You can do a google search on Patch Hypervisor or Host and Virtualbox for a basic primer of what this could involve but I can assure it is a pain when you patch your Linux system only to find your little Virtual machines and docker stuff suddenly don't work.
Having said that, I think the cycle of moving off deprecated systems in OCI on average is about about 2-3 years.
You are probably aware from the last Sydney meetup about my background in Oracle Cloud so feel free to probe me a bit more on this.
Another thought I should add when looking at these partnerships, I look at some of the tradeoffs.
The larger party giving the offer ie Oracle or Larry J Ellison, usually wants something in return.
In this case, I think Oracle also wanted all of Prophecy's existing customer base moved to OCI and not just the ones that needed the move therefore it was worthwhile creating the special partnership. This means Oracle gets more revenue from new customers going into OCI from Prophecy.
In exchange, Prophecy wanted access to potential leads from Oracle's OCI user base and perhaps knowledge synergies.
At the moment, I think the partnership may have cost more to Prophecy than Oracle via the unexpected additional usage fees and it doesn't look like Oracle provided much assistance or even compensation which isn't a surprise. Oracle has a notorious reputation for being aggressive in everything it does. Also a few unhappy customers won't do too much damage to Oracle.
So the relationship between Oracle and Prophecy could be another question.
Instead it may be better for Prophecy to highlight the Oracle connection from their own presales rather than wait on leads from Oracle?
I may sound a bit salty and negative being a former holder. But it is also important to set a few expectations and be aware that it is not always a bed of roses dealing with a larger dominant party.
My previous experience in the industry is that ORCL is a company that is “hated” by many of its customers that feel trapped.
I’m also looking at ORCL share price, currently on about a 34x PE and with a 5Y beta of 1.02 (i.e. going to perform roughly like the market).
Finally, ORCL is pretty low down on cloud market share.
IMHO, PRO represents a lot of option for a significant jump in valuation (either through crossing the chasm and becoming profitable or getting acquired by someone larger for a decent premium) that ORCL does not. You would probably be just as well off buying NDQ.
DISC: Hold tiny amount of PRO IRL, would not touch ORCL.
