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After a Lull, Sun Server Business Grows Under Oracle

Posted by timothy on from the was-it-foretold? dept.

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."

8 of 84 comments (clear)

  1. Double the Price, Half the Servers? by BBCWatcher · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Double the Price, Half the Servers? by Migala77 · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

  2. Bullshit! by swordgeek · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Bullshit! by HBI · · Score: 3

      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.

      --
      HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
    2. Re:Bullshit! by Kyusaku+Natsume · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

      --
      Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
    3. Re:Bullshit! by idontgno · · Score: 3

      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.

      --
      Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
  3. Prices went up, sortof by Sandman1971 · · Score: 3

    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
  4. Re:support to expensive by Nevo · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.