Slashdot Mirror
After a Lull, Sun Server Business Grows Under Oracle
itwbennett writes "For the first time since the 3rd quarter of 2007, IDC is reporting an increase in sales of Sun hardware. Oracle logged $773 million in server sales during the quarter, up from $681 million the year before, according to IDC's estimates."
If they were still selling sparc desktops/workstations, I'd have upgraded by now... I may be the only one, but I still would have purchased one :-)
this would have been first post by my proxy server is sloow..
In other words, IDC is reporting that Oracle raised prices. That strategy works for a quarter or two, maybe. But it's a going out of business strategy.
IDC can say what they want, but the only way Sun hardware sales are growing is because Oracle bumped up the price on the hardware, and companies are buying their last Sun gear to give a two-year buffer to migrate away from.
I don't know of a single company ANYWHERE that is actively growing their Sun server farm. Everyone is running away screaming as fast as they can from Sun/Oracle.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
probably still are now, no matter what the disposable smartphone crowd says
I thought it was Oracle's intention to kill the Sun name, as they've certainly removed it from OpenOffice and Virtual Box, and I seem to remember hearing about moves to sell sun.com?
I have to say, Sun had the best logo in IT that I've ever seen.
If they would have other support options then 24/7 premier support we would at least consider to continue buying Sun.
For our HPC we only need something like next-business hardware-only.
probably irrelevant, but informative nonetheless : "LUL" is dutch for "penis"
According to IDC, in the 4th quarter of 2010 Oracle/Sun had $883 million in server hardware revenue. Thus, on a quarter-to-quarter basis, Oracle was down substantially in the 1st quarter of 2011 (to $773 million). Oracle had what's called an "easy compare" -- very easy. I'd really like to see the unit shipment numbers, though, because I strongly suspect Oracle had to raise unit prices substantially to even make that $773M.
IDC also reports that IBM's System z mainframe hardware (only) revenue was $1.0 billion in the first quarter of 2011. From IDC's report it seems that counts only the z/OS machines and not the mainframes running other operating systems (e.g. Linux). Year over year, the IBM mainframe grew the fastest of any server type, up 41.1%. In other words, IBM's mainframe hardware business alone was about one third larger than Oracle's entire hardware business. Impressive and not impressive, respectively. I think IBM is more or less the Apple of the server industry, the only one left doing any substantial R&D and concentrating on qualities of service, which helps to explain why IBM mainframes contain 5.2 GHz CPUs, for example, when nobody else can get into the 4's. (Mainframe folks used to have to explain clock speed discrepancies, with justification. Now they don't even need to do that.) Sun used to be a big innovator, but, very sadly, that was long, long ago.
I know some companies had a hell of a time getting in large orders (over half a million $$). It was like Oracle didn't want money for their hardware. I'm thinking this was by design, so that one quarter would look better/worse than others.
"You may all go to hell and I will go to Texas"
Sen. Davy Crocket to US Congress, Nov. 1, 1835
Having recently had a hand in buying new Sun/Oracle hardware, I can attest that prices did not directly go up, BUT the discounts offered to corporations have gone down. For example (using fake numbers) we used to get a 20% discount on hardware purchases, but now only get 10%.
It's better to burn out than to fade away
There is nothing one sufficiently creative accounting department cannot achieve :D
They were selling almost nothing. 80 million more revenue per quarter wouldn't mean anything significant to IBM, Dell or HP. For Oracle it's about 10 percent growth.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Given the utter awfulness of Oracle's support for the SUN hardware, I can't imagine anyone buying these machines. This is hands-down the worst server support I've ever received.
The extra sales may be due to Oracle changing the hardware support expiration on a lot of older servers. With Sun it used to be that you could keep a server up and running for a decade and continue to get parts under a support contract. Not anymore. A lot of shops probably have to upgrade, right now, whether they like it or not. It also seems that Oracle is making progress with being less Troll like about selling things. For the last 6mo it seems like I could approach them, cash in hand, and they would refuse to negotiate.
Note to Oracle. I've been a rabid Sun fan for many years, but I ain't buying from Oracle any more. They make it too difficult. HP and IBM will be very glad to take my money.
Oracle: bought Sun (Java, Solaris, MySQL, server hardware business, SPARC processors, SAN/mainframe storage business) for $7.4 billion.
Microsoft: bought Skype for $8.5 billion.
Which would you rather have under your Christmas tree?
The only people buy sun now are replacements for apps that are locked into sun.
Nobody new is moving to sun, that is unless they're retarded.
Where I work we run oracle, since we run Oracle, we've got an Oracle rep. our Oracle rep has been calling us nearly once a week asking if we want to buy a server, we keep telling him no. My manager is getting angry at them, and has asked them several times to stop calling.
Having wasted over a *month* in getting support on a less-than-one-year-old server the beginning of this year, and that included being handed off to an engineer in Chile for two weeks, whose manager kept putting him on other jobs, so that frequently it was a day or two or three before he could respond to my emails, I would NEVER advise buying Oracle/Sun to anyone... and I've joined my manager and my co-worker in that attitude.
Wait till Oracle dumps Sun, the way they've dumped some of Sun's OSS projects.
mark
The title is misleading. People are not switching because they love Oracle. I bet you the majority of customers are those who cut back on I.T. from 2007 and just tried to squeeze the existing equipments' life until 2011. This is just pent up demand as Oracle and Sun customers had 2002 era machines that need to be upgraded that are dying. So they purchase newer Oracle servers and maybe update their Java 1.3 software with a java 6 while they are at it too while the companies have cash to burn. IBM, Intel, and even Microsoft are seeing growth too mostly from existing customers updating their very old servers and desktops as well.
Nothing else to see folks move along.
http://saveie6.com/
You've lost that looovin feelin, Oh that loovin feelin.. ...
Gone, gone, gone.
Organization? You must be joking..
According to press reports, Sun didn't accept IBM's best and final offer, which was only a couple pennies per share below Oracle's eventual winning bid. With hindsight, it appears IBM smelled a rotting corpse. Sometimes losing honorably is the big win.
It took me 3 months to get replacement batteries for my disk arrays, 2 months to get MyOracleSupport enabled and my equipment registered on it so that I could download patches which were previously available for free. If Oracle thinks this is how to support customers it's going to have a very low ROI on its Sun acquisition. It's almost the worst customer service I've ever experienced.
I think IBM is more or less the Apple of the server industry, the only one left doing any substantial R&D and concentrating on qualities of service,
It's really sad that you think that.
You've been taken in by the marketing, Apple develop very little themselves (Thunderbolt == Intel, Retina == LG) and their customer service is crap (_I_ have to go to a an apple store where they might look at it... some time next week). Seriously, MS and Red Hat do a lot more R&D then Apple does. Not even considering the amount of stuff that comes out of Google, the difference being Google, Red Hat or even MS wont patent the crap out of everything they invent, let alone the stuff they didn't invent (like rounded corners and a grid of icons)
IBM is the complete opposite of this. When I buy an IBM X series server, I know I can depend on it and in the off chance it does fail, I can depend on IBM. I describe the IBM X3650 as the Aston Martin DB9 of x86-64 servers, well worth the extra $K or 2 you pay over a Dell x64 server. They are fast, powerful, functional, reliable and an absolute pleasure to work with, IBM tapes all the important info you'd need to work on an X3650 to the lid of the server.
That sort of openness, adaptability and user friendliness is the antitheses of Apple lock down policies.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Do you know what this means? PHB's are still idiots! Stop the presses!