Oracle Direct Regional Manager (Real Sales)
Pros
1. For those that can figure out how to "manipulate" the inflexible Oracle systems, you can make a lot of money if you have the right territory or territories. 2. For those that want to be lazy and collect a paycheck, come on in! The water's great. Easy place just to sit and never be fired. Suckers like me will take pity on you and help you through whatever you need because that's the way I am. 3. For those that love change, come aboard! The plan and strategy (lack thereof) changes every 3-6-9 months, leaving everyone trying to clean up and ride out what was approved only to have everything turned upside down. 4. If you did want to stay at Oracle and not for #1, there are potential opportunities outside of sales however, you will need attainment and awesome networking. You are just a number here, so thinking that you can apply internally and get preference is a horrible lie.
Cons
I've never worked at a Sales oriented company where I've had to fight with so many departments to get a deal done, only to then have provisioning screw everything up. I spend more than half my work day helping my reps fix Oracle created internal problems so the customers can actually receive the service they want or are paying for. Its embarrassing to win a sales cycle only to have Oracle screw it up so badly (internally) that the customer questions why they're going to trust their mission critical enterprise application to a company who can't get a technical question or something else answered in a week? Secondly, from an operations standpoint, SaaS/PaaS/IaaS need better resources. Asking a customer to wait 4-6 weeks after the customer buys to receive their environment, is unacceptable. Other Cloud Providers I've worked for do it in minutes if not hours. To add insult to injury, then provisioning screws up the order and when they're questioned, you get some snarky answer of: "These are complex deals". Clearly something is broken. If they're overworked, why should the customer suffer because Oracle can't hire people fast enough? Or, as its commonly known throughout the Sales Org, there are bugs in our provisioning software that do not get resolved in a timely manner. I'm not referring to a couple of weeks but rather months. This is months of this negatively impacting the customer.
