Resellers and customers frustrated by botched Oracle deliveries

Channel loses rag with Larry's logistics

Oracle resellers are counting the cost of frequent instances of botched logistics.

According to sources at several large dealers, four to six week lead times are unreliable, and deliveries are being made to the wrong addresses by the freight forwarding company. Two months can elapse from the first product arriving and complete fulfillment of an order.

"We keep booking engineers on-site and that is costing us money when the products are not delivered," said one disgruntled partner. "Oracle has no compensation [mechanism] in place."

Blame for the debacle has been laid at the door of freight forwarder Kuehne + Nagel by Oracle, claimed another reseller; but he argued that the vendor's infrastructure was still struggling to handle hardware shipments having migrated from Sun's internal systems to its own.

"If you make a cake with rubbish ingredients you get a rotten cake," he told The Reg, "I would not tolerate a distributor screwing up logistics… K + N are specialists and I can't see how they would fail like this."

Last year, Oracle told its two distributors Avnet and Arrow that it did not require them to provide logistics and instead wanted them to help generate demand, usher partners into the new programme and help out with dealer development.

Sources claimed Oracle was looking into changing its freight forwarder in the next month, saying "this is a work in progress".

A company insider estimated that Oracle had 25 per cent fewer UK resellers that signed a contract with the vendor in October to join the accreditation scheme, Oracle Partner Network; and even those that agreed to the new Ts&Cs are doing less business with the firm.

"By default we are doing much more business elsewhere with rivals that are easier to deal with," said another.

This can be seen in Oracle's latest UK server revenues figures collated by IDC this week, with sales down more than 25 per cent year-on-year.

Oracle refused to comment and Kuehne + Nagel were unavailable to comment . ®