Has anyone dealt with a situation involving the Four Cornerstone and Oracle partnership? Four Cornerstone was our Oracle partner, and we paid them $15,000 in March for a MySQL license renewal. They apparently never submitted the renewal to Oracle before Oracle ended its partnership with Four Cornerstone. Oracle has confirmed that it never received our payment or renewal order, while Four Cornerstone has stopped responding to our attempts to get either the renewal completed or our money refunded.
We are a small company, and $15,000 is a significant loss for us. Oracle says we need to pursue reimbursement directly from Four Cornerstone and is helping us arrange a new renewal through another reseller, potentially backdated to May 5, 2025. We mainly want to recover the money we paid for a service that was never delivered. Has anyone experienced something similar or know the best way to handle it?
3 Answers
This has moved beyond a normal IT support issue. Your contract and payment were with Four Cornerstone, not Oracle, so involve your accounts-payable team and an attorney. Review the contract, payment records, purchase order, and every unanswered communication. There is also a possibility the company is insolvent, so assume the money may be difficult to recover while working with Oracle on a replacement renewal.
Once this is resolved, review the vendor carefully before using them again, and consider keeping a list of products and suppliers that create excessive licensing or support risk. Oracle products can become expensive and difficult to manage, so it may be worth evaluating alternatives to reduce the chance of being trapped in a similar situation later.
I would pursue two tracks at once: have counsel send Four Cornerstone a formal demand for the unused $15,000, and work with Oracle on restoring coverage through a different reseller so the business does not remain exposed. Keep the Oracle correspondence showing that the renewal was never submitted; that should help establish that Four Cornerstone failed to perform what you paid them to do.
That is essentially what we’re doing. Fortunately, we located a Four Cornerstone contact who is now working with us on issuing a refund, so there may be a positive resolution after all.
I agree that legal and finance should be involved. My director assigned me to help manage the issue, so I’m gathering the documentation and coordinating with everyone.