On 5/31/2010 1:16 AM, Edward Martinez wrote:
Once again, quarterly revenue drop was due mostly to
one-off events.
And, as pointed out elsewhere, hardware revenue for
this market segment
is a significantly smaller chunk of total revenue
than for the x64
market. That is, percentage wise, the total amount
spent on the
hardware for the UNIX market is significantly less vs
the x64 market.
For the UNIX market, you often see up to 10x the
hardware costs spent in
support, service, integration, additional software
stack, etc. You
don't get anywhere near that multiplier for x64
systems, where hardware
costs are a *much* greater portion of the total
budget being spent.
Put another way: I'm better off selling (1) $500k
UNIX system than
(100) $10k x64 systems, because I'll almost certainly
be able to sell
$2m in service/software/etc for the UNIX system,
whereas I'll likely not
be able to sell more than $100-200k in add-ons for
the x64 gear.
I'm trying to understand, if this is great model then why didn't SUN focus
only selling high end SPARC Units instead of trying to get into the X86
server market? maybe SUN would still around, Right?
(a) Sun Sales was pretty dysfunctional. Which comes from leadership at
the top. Q.E.D.
(b) You may not make the margin in x64 where you do in high-end, but
it's money you wouldn't otherwise make. It's not a zero-sum game. That
is, you still make money in x64 sales, and NOT having a x64 department
will actually cost you sales in the high-end department, as clients want
to be able to buy a wide variety of things from a single vendor.
Something Oracle is going to have to learn about selling servers is that
unless they want to sell ONLY pre-packaged appliances, they're going to
have to carry a rather complete product line. Many of my sales folks
were pointing out that Sun was losing sales due to gaps in the
top-to-bottom product line, whereas HP and IBM could come in and quote a
total solution for everything, soup-to-nuts. Which means that Oracle is
going to need to have desktops, thin clients, workgroup servers,
department servers, enterprise servers, storage, tape, and the software
to make it all manageable. Sun had some gaps in there, plus overdoing
some other areas (and having a bunch of stuff that I always wondered
"why are we doing that?").
This isn't to minimize the damage that the Oracle
acquisition did to
Sun's server sales. It's been pretty horrendous. But
sales of the
Solaris ecosystem are a big part of being able to
recover from that, and
to suggest that Oracle dumping (Open)Solaris is a
good bet towards
increasing profitability faster is shortsighted and
frankly exhibits
considerable business market ignorance.
I was only suggesting Oracle has it's hands full at the moment to talk about
OpenSolais roadmap, not about dumping it.
--
As I said before, Oracle isn't talking about OpenSolaris this month
because it doesn't talk about ANYTHING this month. That's not to excuse
the not-so-great job being done before May, but end-of-fiscal-year
accounts for the silence this month.
Not that I have any special knowledge, but I really expect the
OpenSolaris 2010.06 announcement and availability to happen shortly
after Oracle announces Fiscal Year results, which means in a couple of
days or so. I'm hoping that enough noise has peculated up through the
Sales Reps to encourage more (and better) communication around Solaris
and OpenSolaris thereafter, but I'm also hoping that the community
hasn't gone so far down the Chicken Little ("The Sky is Falling! The Sky
is Falling!) hysterical hole that when info is forthcoming, it actually
is absorbed.
--
Erik Trimble
Java System Support
Mailstop: usca22-123
Phone: x17195
Santa Clara, CA
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