I just received a cold call from Oracle moments ago. I’m actually a bit shocked to be honest.
Let’s describe my relationship with Oracle for a moment:
- In seven years as a sysadmin, I’ve never had a business relationship with Oracle
- I’ve never run an Oracle product in any of my shops
- I’ve never directly or indirectly inquired about Oracle products with Oracle or their resellers
- I’ve never once feigned interest in anything Oracle has done until the day they bought Sun Microsystems
So what was the cold call about? They wanted to sell me on Oracle Unbreakable Linux and Oracle VM. They were targeting our RedHat (well, CentOS) installations and wanted to get a foot in the door for their virtualization product (Xen) Thanks, but seriously… No thanks!
I’ve been approached by vendors before at trade shows or expos or even via existing reseller relationships but this out of the blue cold call is entirely new to me. I can ignore the fact that Oracle’s representative had less than stellar English skills. That’s not paramount, although it made for lengthy repetitions where it otherwise wouldn’t have been necessary. It’s that cold call tactic that has me fired up! Are they seriously trolling my employer’s public directory in which my name and number is listed to see if anything bites?
Overall, I’m really turned off by Oracle’s slimy cold call tactics. Please don’t call again, Oracle. Your rebranded-and-slightly-modified RHEL and Xen clones be damned!
They call the place of my employment on an almost daily basis using different numbers every day. They claim to have meetings with people here (which turns out to be a bold face lie), they even pretend that we call them for service with out computers (we have an in house tech division that takes care of all of our computers so we don’t need outside help). They will use every tactic in the book to try to speak to people who have no decision making ability whatsoever. Just because we use their products does not give Oracle the right to bother our employees.