Oracle Consulting Rate Card

Seems quite reasonable.<p>I sell a white label version of one of my products (Twiddla), with an API for integrating it into your site. From time to time I field requests from people who want to build their thing on top of our platform, asking if we do consulting.<p>I tell them yes, then quote what it would take to build what they want and 90% of them have a heart attack on the spot.<p>"But we have this quote from another developer saying he can do the whole thing for $1,500!"<p>I don't doubt it. But then I suspect his dev didn't build Twiddla. I did, so I charge accordingly. I recommend having your own team do your integration since really it's quite straightforward, but if you really need it to work right and you need it fast, you can go straight to the source (but it'll cost you.)<p>It's the same thing with Oracle. Sure you can find a guy to build your thing for $25/hr, and chances are he'll probably even do a good job. But if you want to remove all the "probably's" from that sentence you can pay 10x as much and have Oracle do it for you.

Also note the Oracle supplied GSA (Federal) price list: (see page 21)<p><a href="http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/gsa-pricelist-070605.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/gsa-pricelist-070...</a><p>Which means that's the cheapest rate Oracle is allowed to give. By law.

Those rates are about half of what I'd expect.

for the multiple comments like "omg that's outrageous!", this blog post will help understand the economics of consulting[1].<p><pre><code> [1] http://blog.asmartbear.com/consulting-company-accounting.html</code></pre>

I'd like to see the average salaries of the people providing this work. I expect most of them are in the range of $40-80 per hour (annualized), or about 20% of the total.<p>If that number is right, the customer is paying 25% for the work, 25% for the overhead of the consulting company, and 50% for the Oracle brand.

It seems I'm the only one shocked at how much this is.<p>Going up to $484/hr as I read it, seems out of the ballpark to me reasonability-wise. I'm sure they do a good job, but just like a lawyer that might charge that rate, high rates don't mean mistakes are never made.<p>I'm pretty sure if I wanted to get a primary contributor to any open source database software to consult on a project, it would be far far less, and they'd know it just as well (if not better) than an Oracle consultant knows Oracle. I'm guessing the majority of these consultants don't touch the core code of the product that often.<p>I guess I still haven't been properly explained the real value of Oracle yet. We use it at my dayjob, and every time I have to deal with it I am frustrated. Its so expensive, but why again is this significantly better than PostgreSQL?

I need to charge people more for customisation and integration work.<p>I suck at charging people money for hourly work.

How did you get two urls in the title for this one?

I was expecting that to be a list of really, really expensive rates.<p>That's actually pretty cheap.

Yeah these are either old, or special rates for US Federal Whatevers.<p>I know quite a few senior (ish) consultants in Oracle who were billed at 3x this.<p>It makes sense that they give the feds a different rate though - I would assume federal contracts last much longer than a lay customer (3x longer?).

I think these rates are low (and probably old). I worked for a systems integrator over 10 years ago and our bill rates for similar levels were higher.

Staff Consultant - 1-3 yrs of experience and the rate is $220/hr in NY. Wow, I wish I had that job!

I was expecting it to be more

What actually is "outrageous" about those rates is what will ends up in the pocket of the poor sob who will be doing all the work... because it won't be an actual Oracle employee but very likely just some small contractor.<p>I used to be a consultant working for a contractor for Sun (all big names in consulting do this, however. saves their hr costs) and Sun charged the customer about what you see on that card; the company I was working for, however, would end up getting about or less than half of that.<p>All Sun was actually doing was providing a "project manager" I never saw and I didn't get remotely the kind of information and access to information that actual Sun techs would get and have. So ultimately they just sold their "good name" and passed on the work and kept the lion's share and when one of the projects went south (nobody effectively got the customer under control), they made sure all their contracts were water-tight and passed all the blame right down to us and we had to pay them back.<p>Consulting is dirty, dirty business and you'll be swimming with sharks much, much bigger than you when working for the average small, highly effective and flexible IT company. And yes, you will sell your soul more often than you shall like.

wow, that's a lot more than an EE consultant can ever make.