Speaking as someone who has worked extensively in the financial services world, I can tell you that performance is key. You'd be surprised at how many mid-range to high-end SPARC servers are in banks today. And I'm not talking about E10ks, I'm talking about 6900-25Ks and M5000-M9000s. A lot of these banks also use the T-series servers for web and app. Why do they use these systems? Because they scale, perform extremely well, and are a hell of a lot cheaper than AIX/POWER. Not to mention that finding good AIX people is like finding someone who knows how to run VMS these days. While Linux has eaten away at the "low hanging fruit", it hasn't penetrated the mid-range to high-end servers. And I've seen some shops actually go back to Solaris on SPARC or even x64.
When it comes to numbers, Oracle is still selling more units of UNIX servers than the rest. But I'd imagine they'll want to get the kinds of profits that IBM makes off of selling a smaller number of units. This can be good and bad. Sun has always been the cheaper solution to the other UNIX flavors and the gear is very reliable, sometimes too reliable. Too many shops are still on 5+ yr old SPARC gear and Solaris 8, simply because the stuff still works. However, I do agree that Oracle needs to communicate better and get the level of confidence up. A lot of shops are in a holding pattern until they know which way things are going to go. Sadly, I think that if customers had attended the Oracle OpenWorld event this year, they would be very confident with the direction of things. As it relates to OpenSolaris and other open source projects.. well lets just say that Oracle has a lot to learn about diplomacy. They've pissed off multiple communities, employees, and supporters. *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Octave J. Orgeron Solaris Virtualization Architect and Consultant Web: http://unixconsole.blogspot.com E-Mail: unixcons...@yahoo.com *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* ----- Original Message ---- From: Richard L. Hamilton <rlha...@smart.net> To: opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org Sent: Tue, October 26, 2010 6:10:43 AM Subject: Re: [osol-discuss] Quick question about the future [...] > Oracle are targeting Solaris at Banks. They don't > seem to want a Solaris community. They seem to want > your money, and only want you using Solaris 11 > Express if you're developing for it, evaluating it, > or intend to buy it. Not sure if it's so much greed as control freaks. Or else they think that Sun's problem was that they gave too much away. If so, I think they're way off track. I think Sun's problem was twofold: SPARC chip development slippage, and not knowing how to _sell_ stuff. I mean, commissions for gross sales rather than net, such that the sales droids would push out the door stuff that was losing money (who but grocery stores selling disposable diapers to hook the parents on buying all their other overpriced stuff _really_ sells at a loss on a routine basis?), and an obsession for renaming products. Why rename the volume manager software once or twice? Why rename the compiler suite three or four times? Why spend money to change the darn stock symbol? Those things may get a quick press release, but anyone stupid enough to be fooled by that kind of press release won't be around long enough to spend big money. In exchange for the cost of all that unnecessary rebranding is more confusion than publicity. And the control freak theory would certainly fit the exodus of major talent. But going after _banks_, please. Sun had a pretty good thing going with phone companies, AFAIK. Yes, banks will buy bigger systems. But banks have been using Burroughs (now Unisys) MCP (now ClearPath/MCP) based systems for ages. Most don't need screaming performance, they need a system that is as _boring_ (reliable, but boring) as possible. I don't know if that theory is accurate. But Oracle needs to start understanding pretty soon that they not only need to make money now, they also need to avoid alienating their best developers and also all the small-time users (students, programmers/sysadmins that also use Solaris at home, small businesses) that may eventually control larger amounts of money in the future. With all the uncertainty about government policies, a whole lot of the economy stinks because those with money are all in a wait-and-see attitude. Right now, with the huge exodus of talent from Oracle, if someone were to ask me, I'd unfortunately have to say wait-and-see for Sun/Oracle hardware and Solaris. That's not what I'd want to say. It doesn't help anybody. And it's some of my favorite software, that I've been working with for years. The irony is that in the long run, the independent folks that fork software derived from OpenSolaris (and OpenOffice) might actually save Oracle from themselves, by keeping reasonably compatible software available to the rest of us. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
