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."

Comments

Double the Price, Half the Servers?

[BBCWatcher]

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.

Re:Double the Price, Half the Servers?

[Migala77]

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.

Where did you read this? Nothing about the price is mentioned in the article, apart from that sales of pricier servers have increased in general. Oracle sales are more or less matching overall market growth, so neither a higher market share nor higher price is necessary for Oracle's revenue to go up.

Re:Double the Price, Half the Servers?

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Oracle cleaned up ship and mandated that you charge for the products and you don't give out free support (that's what the CONTRACTS that companies like mine pay money to have with Sun/oracle are for).

So you were paying Sun for a contract that you didn't need because they were giving away support for free? How generous of your company!

By charging for your product instead of giving it away like a whore...

I do not think it means what you think it means.

Re:Double the Price, Half the Servers?

[rubycodez]

yeah, but those *not* running long-obsolete old stuff are the ones seeing the contract jacking price problem. Awesomely impressive your systems are still going strong.

Re:Double the Price, Half the Servers?

[cthulhu11]

Oracle required Sun VAR's to enroll in their own, more-rigorous VAR program in order to sell the newer products. Many Sun VAR's didn't bother, which has caused us no end of grief given a requirement that we have to come up with three quotes to buy stuff. They added restrictions to the the quoting process and the automatic 20% (or whatever) discount that one would get through just about any VAR on systems is no longer the case. That's effectively a price increase. They've also substantially increased the price of support contracts. That said, Soracle x64 systems continue to rock. They work well, have thoughtful physical design, and they have real, working, useful serial consoles. No "attach a keyboard and monitor" crap, no need to pull a DHCP server out of your ass. I have yet to identify a single other x64 vendor with a fully-useful serial console. Maybe those of you with two 'servers' sitting on a desk don't see the value in this, but when you routinely have to bring up systems purchased and racked in an unstaffed facility on another continent where the by-the-hour local hands have even fewer English skills than tech savvy, having a working serial console to get in to configure the rest is a frickin' GODSEND.

Bullshit!

[swordgeek]

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.

Re:Bullshit!

[Denogh]

I don't know of a single company ANYWHERE that is actively growing their Sun server farm. Everyone but the U.S. Government is running away screaming as fast as they can from Sun/Oracle.

FTFY.

Seriously. The federal government still thinks there's some advantage to running Solaris on Sparc. My project tosses a few million of government money at Sun/Oracle every 1-2 years for "support" and new hardware.

Re:Bullshit!

[HBI]

Even the government has cut way back on Sun purchases, in some areas. For instance, Sun was the only vendor for a certain server stack (made up of x4100 M1/M2 and x4600 servers) that the Army uses heavily in deployed or deployable units. There are hundreds of these stacks out there, created from 05 to about a year ago. They dropped Sun as a hardware source effective about a year ago. Oracle policies, mostly, had to do with this. Switched to Dell. That one contract alone was worth quite a bit.

Re:Bullshit!

[Kyusaku Natsume]

Since most high end servers last in service at least 6 years, I guess that most sales come from the fact that Oracle touts the Oracle DB/Sparc combo as the fastest combination for running Oracle DB. That coupled with the fact that migration is "relatively" easy with Solaris 10 containers, for customers used to a system that only want it to be faster, that makes sense. Fujitsu, the fourth largest server seller, also manufactures a lot of Sparc equipment under its own brand and for Oracle itself.

Re:Bullshit!

[idontgno]

Agreed. In my experience, the US Government has increasingly shifted away from Sun toward either IBM humongous iron (pSeries or zSeries) or Dell commodity x64 stuff. The middle ground is where most of Sun's catalog could have been, but it's too easy to set up server partitions or VMs on the big boxen to cover those needs, or else a few x64 blades.

Now, the US Government would be happy to keep shoveling money at Oracle, but that's for their RDBMS product and its associated bells, whistles, licenses, and maintenance.

support to expensive

[murple]

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.

Re:support to expensive

[Nevo]

I'd be happy if they'd just provide competent support, at any price. We have ~10,000 SUN servers and Oracle is happy to let my servers sit out of production for weeks at a time when they can't figure out the cause of a problem. If my software platform didn't have redundancy built in at the application layer I'd be losing millions of dollars a month to this. Dell, HP, or IBM would replace a server if they couldn't get it back into production. Not Oracle. Oracle will "research" the problem for weeks on end while my server sits, powered up, but out of production.

And Oracle/Sun Down from Previous Quarter

[BBCWatcher]

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.

Prices went up, sortof

[Sandman1971]

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%.