We were talking about what Oracle was doing not Sun's reps. Oracle was pushing for Linux, Oracle customers were deploying more on Solaris/SPARC.
RedHat revenues are about $500mln. Novel around $1bln, mostly from legacy products, not SuSE. Microsoft is $16bln. Add up all the open source vendors together and they don't even make a dent in the revenues of MS.
If you look at RedHat, while their revenues have been growing fast, their profits have been falling.
Windows server sales $4.8bln last quarter. Unix server sales $4.9 bln. Linux server sales fell to $1.8bln. Unix Linux combined make up less than half of server sales, and that's fighting it's way back.
As I said earlier, Oracle will likely push Oracle DB and will likely continue to push Linux.
You're entitled to your opinion, but you're probably wrong.
Oracle will definately push Oracle DB, it's their main earner. They will support Linux but will likely push Solaris. If they were going to push Linux they would have bought RedHat, because Linux to Oracle means RedHat.
I'm not talking Linux developers here, I'm talking RedHat developers. It's an important distinction.
RedHat is a lot more than just the Linux kernel, which you know, but I'm stating here so that I can reduce any confusion of what I'm talking about.
RedHat's biggest accomplishment hasn't been anything they did with the kernel. It's been the ISV and IHV support that they were able to get. That's what allowed RedHat to penetrate into the corporate data center.
That's not going to be something any fork will be able to accomplish quickly or easily. I don't believe even SuSE has the same level of ISV and IHV support.
First, I like Linux. Right now around me I have one Windows desktop, and an equal mix of Solaris and Linux development servers running Debian and CentOS and even DSL on an old laptop.
You obviously don't understand how stupid some of the things are that people say about Linux around here though. For example, when IBM was in talks to buy Sun, some person replied that RedHat should buy Sun. RedHat and Novel combined couldn't afford to buy half of Sun.
I suspect that Oracle is going to allow Solaris to be EQUALLY supported
When you're customers are choosing Solaris over Linux, you don't allow Solaris to be supported, it's not your choice. If you want to stay in business and make money, you do what your customers want.
They believe that Linux is the way to break MS's monopoly since it has such traction.
And that's the wrong way to do it and it's been failing.
First, Linux didn't have traction. Unix had traction but MS has been eating into that market.
Linux went after the low hanging fruit, the Unix market since it was more compatible with Unix than MS.
Meanwhile MS has been eating into the server market.
The right way to do it would have been to use Linux as a way to stabilize or grow the Unix share in the marketplace against MS and carve out a bigger piece for itself in that space. Instead, they decided to attack the Unix space and spread the same type of FUD that MS does.
So in the end, Linux is gaining share against Unix, but it's growing share in a constantly shrinking slice of the pie.
You can't really buy what Redhat has worked to gain over the years.
Yeah you can. It's a publicly traded company. You don't even need their permission to buy it.
And it would only cost you $3.3 billion - the $1 billion in cash and short term investments you'd acquire when you did. But $2.3 billion for a company with only a half billion in annual revenues, 76 million in annual net income (with no income growth despite dramatic revenue growth) doesn't seem worth it.
It's not that you can't buy RedHat. You don't want to.
You can't buy Linux, but you sure as hell can buy RedHat and the developers won't be jumping ship. Especially in this economic climate where raising money for a RedHat fork that can compete with the RedHat brand isn't likely.
And you sure as hell can sell RedHat as a lot of insiders have been doing lately. If you can sell something, you can buy it.
Please tell me, that English is not your first language.
English is my first language (gee maybe second but it's very close I learned two at the same time). Slashdot isn't my first priority and I'm usually doing one or more other things while I'm typing. It's common for me to stop in the middle of a sentence then come back in mid thought which screws things up.
I type pretty fast but I still think faster than I type and that gets in the way too.
If I took the time to proofread, I'd spot the errors. But commenting on Slashdot, just isn't that important to me and I couldn't care less about the grammatical errors as long as the underlying message gets across.
This is bad news for anyone who uses Java (esp. NetBeans), OpenOffice or MySQL, though. Particularly anyone invested in having their java code work the same on every platform.
OpenOffice.org will be fine. Gives something for Ellison to go after MSOffice with (Larry no likey Bill).
MySQL, I wouldn't be toooo worried their. They've been good with InnoDB and MySQL isn't even on the same level of Oracle Express or whatever it was called. MySQL expands Oracle's presence and can get their salespeople in the door. I think last year, Sun got MySQL's revenus up to $88mln while it was only around $50 before they bought them (and dropped to around $35 after they bought them.)
I'm more worried about PostgreSQL. Now that's an opensource database that could nip at Oracle's heels. Sun has been a proponent of PostgreSQL, hiring a developer, supporting it on Solaris, including it in their OS, donating hardware for the pgsql developers to test scalability. I hope Oracle doesn't stop that and realizes they can use that to their advantage as well. I'm going to say it again. Had Sun not bought MySQL, and instead focused on PostgreSQL, they could probably still be independent.
As for Java, the JCP isn't as broken as everyone thinks and Java is so big now and Oracle so invested in Java, it wouldn't be smart for Oracle to mess with it too much.
"all reports I've read in the press indicate that Oracle has been handling the mergers very well."
*cough*peoplesoft fiasco*cough*
I'm talking post merger. Merger might not be the right word in that case. It was pretty much a hostile takeover with Peoplesoft kicking and screaming as well as legal battles to get it done.
Even now, years later, while they've been working on consolidating the PeopleSoft and JD Edwards products, they haven't abandoned support for the legacy systems people are using.
It will probably be just like every other merger of companies that should fit well together... it won't.
Oracle has been buying up a lot of companies recently. The general consensus seems to be that they've had a good merger and acquisition strategy and that they have pulled them all off well.
Larry Ellison want's to create the world's largest software company and dethrone MS. He's tried everything including support for nettops.
Considering MS gained dominance through an operating system and an office suite, what Ellison did with just a database is quite remarkable.
They have since grown their software portfolio to include enterprise applications, application servers and middleware.
Now with Sun, their getting an OS, a great development platform and a lot of other nice things in addition to the hardware business.
Oracle's revenue after the Sun acquisition should be close to Microsoft's and close to half of IBM and HP's.
Sun was only about a quarter of the size of IBM and HP, it's two biggest competitors and wasn't doing too bad considering who they were up against. And like I said, Oracle wasn't too shabby in the software world.
The combination of the two, if done properly, should really be fierce. Oracle has been buying a lot of companies in the past few years and all reports I've read in the press indicate that Oracle has been handling the mergers very well.
I thought Cisco would have been the ideal buyer for Sun and I didn't even consider Oracle. Now that the merger has been announced and I had time to think about it, I couldn't think of a much better buyer of Sun.
The two companies have so much in common. People that deploy Oracle tend to do it on Solaris/SPARC more than any other platform and that's been the case for a long time. So the companies have had a strong relationship over the years. Not always great, but overall pretty good. The big knock was when Ellison decided to switch developer workstations to Linux from Solaris, which may not have been a good idea since Solaris/SPARC deployments still beat linux deployments for Oracle.
Here you have two CEO's that hate MS, and want to dominate IBM. We're in for some interesting times.
While I don't hate Linux, the linux fanbois on here have been getting on my nerves so let me throw in this barb.
When the opportunity to buy Sun, Oracle chose them over RedHat. RedHat wouls probably have cost them only $2bln compared to the $5.6bln it's going to cost to buy Sun. So suck it!:)
You only get to "whoooosh" when someone makes a joke and someone doesn't get it.
Whooosh doesn't apply when someone botches a joke.
And while I'm at it, let me just add, cause you people have been using wooosh too often lately. Something funny could be a stupid phrase, but just because you say something stupid, doesn't mean it's funny.
It's like that old mathematical explanation of sets. For example, all mom's are female, but your mom's a fat skank.
Ah, the infamous "common knowledge". I will tell you that any of Sun's recent SEC filings are pretty pathetic, and SPARC has done so well that the company is for sale. That should tell you something.
Hardware/OS Support billings were around $900mln for the quarter. When you consider most of the hardware sold was for Sparc servers (Storage was only around $500mln), it's safe to assume that most of the hardware/OS support was related to SPARC servers.
That's an argument by precedent: "The sun has risen every morning, therefore it will always rise."
CEOs should be forward looking, not backwards looking. Does SPARC really stand a chance against the x86 world at this point, especially as the x86 world is beginning to embrace PLD and GPU computing as well?
No. It's a statement of fact. Ellison tried to be forward-looking back in 2002 when he decided to switch the Oracle developers workstations from Solaris to Linux. He expected Linux to be the top deployment platform for Oracle. Because if you're smart, you develop your application on the most popular system your customers use.
Here we are seven years later and that hasn't happened. Either he was too forward looking, or he was wrong. Both are bad. CEOs aren't supposed to take big leaps with a company that large. They need to take big steps, with one leg firmly planted in the present.
As for open source databases, I use them a lot. In the past couple of years, only PostgreSQL and I have been deploying it on Solaris/x86 on whitebox servers with great results.
When I've deployed Oracle, it's been on Solaris/SPARC, but I know some big companies that are deploying on Linux as well.
I don't know the exact numbers of Oracle vs DB2 on AIX, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was close to evenly split. If Oracle wasn't the primary DB for HP servers is likely MSSQL, unless you're talking only their unix servers in which case I would be surprised if it's not Oracle. In that space, the only real choices are Oracle and DB2 and you would expect HP to not want to have their customers give money to their biggest competitor.
I don't understand the general animosity towards Sun around here. Generally people tend to root for the underdog, and I believe that to be especially true in the geek world.
Sun's biggest competitors are IBM and HP. In that instance, Sun is clearly David. But people want to pit Solaris vs Linux and in that case Sun is Goliath in terms of company size and revenues.
I think it's unfortunate because of all the work Sun did with open source.
You'll notice he didn't name Sparc as a reason to buy Sun.
But he did mention that Solaris/SPARC was the most popular choice for deploying Oracle DB.
It wouldn't make much sense to buy a company and kill your customer's favorite product.
Plus, Oracle want's to compete with IBM and they need SPARC to go head to head with IBM's power servers. Oracle doesn't sell IBM servers directly. If you want to deploy Oracle on AIX/Power, you're going to have to go to IBM first to get the hardware and their salespeople will try to talk you into DB2. That's what Oracle wants to avoid. Now customers can come straight to Oracle and get the hardware and software. With Solaris and SPARC under Ellison's roof, you can bet that there will be the impression that Oracle will run better on Solaris than AIX. That impression is already there today really.
Plus, when you look at how Oracle releases for Solaris/x86 are so slow, it shows they have a preference for Solaris/SPARC.
In addition, up until a few years ago, there was only Solaris and Solaris/x86, Solaris implied Solaris/SPARC.
Two little details: First, there's a SPARC version of Linux, though Sun doesn't support it. (Cannonical does.)
I had Debian running on an old SPARC box a few years ago, but Linux on SPARC is not a viable alternative for enterprise deployments. While Cannonical may support it, it's not going to be supported by most ISV's. I don't even believe Oracle has support for Ubuntu. In the enterprise data center, if you're talking linux, you're generally talking RedHat. That's where the ISV support is. RedHat no longer supports SPARC.
Second, most of Sun's x86 servers end up running Linux or Windows.
I've said this in other threads. Oracle gets deployed on Solaris/SPARC more than on Linux according to what Ellison said today. In addition to Oracle, Solaris enterprise applications. Solaris is still viable but Solaris/x86 adoption has been slow for a number of reasons, including Sun's own sales people. A number of ISVs, such as SAP support Solaris/x86.
There's a lot of potential there and Oracle should work harder to get more Solaris/x86 adoption to help drive sales in the higher margin SPARC servers. It seems that some Sun sales people were afraid to do that, thinking it would further cut into their SPARC sales.
It doesn't matter that Sun's been selling x86 hardware without Solaris. At least people know that sun is now selling x86 hardware, which took a lot of people a long time to realize.
Read any of Sun's SEC filings, press releases, blogs, news stories about Sun, etc. It's pretty much common knowledge.
My point is that Oracle is a software company, and Sun has several software assets that Oracle would like to control.
Oracle is not just a software company any more. They are as much a services company and want to expand that aspect of their business. Adding hardware to the mix allows them to become an all in one shop, like IBM.
It'll be interesting to see if IBM will tolerate Oracle stewardship of Java, since Java is so strategic to IBM and Oracle is a major competitor against DB2.
With Java being open sourced and the JCP being fairly open and Java being very important to Oracle, even more so now with Sun in the mix, they should have no interest in screwing up Java.
Oracle figured out the cost benefits of x86 Linux servers a long time ago, I'll be surprised if they push a proprietary architecture at this point.
Ellison said today that Solaris/SPARC was the most popular choice for Oracle deployments. He's been pushing Oracle/Linux for years now and it's still only #2. Why would he continue to go against his customers?
So why is there still no Oracle 11g for Solaris/x86, when its already been released for most of the other major platforms
Probably because there isn't much demand for Oracle on Solaris/x86 right now.
In the conference call, they mentioned that Solaris/SPARC was the most popular choice and Linux was second.
What's to say down the road, now that Oracle owns Solaris, Solaris/x86 might not get better treatment from Oracle once it's in it's stable. Customers obviously like the Solaris/Oracle combination so I can't see why Oracle on Solaris/x86 support shouldn't improve.
When Oracle customers started switching to Linux, DTrace didn't exist.
Well, I see no reason for someone blogging at Intel, that was part of the migration away from Solaris to Linux, to lie to benefit Sun. Maybe he got the date wrong but there's nothing in the timeline to make it impossible.
Development of DTrace started in 2001 with a working prototype available in 2002. It's not hard to imagine that Oracle developers would have early access to it.
We're not talking about Oracle customers, but the in house developers that were building Oracle.
Re:I'm quite sure that IBM hates itself now
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Oracle Buys Sun
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· Score: 1
Sun has been tanking it for years. Hardware sales are down; people don't give a flying fig about sun's servers.
Sun has close to $14 billion in annual sales, mostly related to sparc servers.
That's a whole lotta figs.
Oracle's DB is the market leader and they have a good appserver and middleware.
Oracle is now a complete solutions provider that can go head to head with IBM. Add to that the hardware sales that go to IBM/HP for Oracle's many products like PeopleSoft now going to Oracle instead...
This will hurt IBM. It probably won't kill them, but they're going to have some serious competition.
HP doesn't offer as many solutions as the Oracle/Sun merger, but HP has been eating into IBMs market.
Safra Katz (Oracle President under Ellison) is saying that he can make Sun's hardware business profitable. That's a credible claim.
I'm surprised more companies weren't interested in buying Sun. They have over $13 billion dollars in revenue. A little bit of fine tuning in the business could mean huge profits.
Why do you find more likely a merger of a desktop company with a server company, than the merger of two complementary server companies.
For the foreseeable future, nobody is going to pry the corporate desktop market away from Microsoft.
But in the corporate data center, merging the most popular enterprise database (Oracle), the most mature, advanced and popular Unix OS (Solaris/SPARC) and matched hardware, along with Java app servers and middleware to go head to head with IBM Global Services is going to be very profitable.
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We were talking about what Oracle was doing not Sun's reps. Oracle was pushing for Linux, Oracle customers were deploying more on Solaris/SPARC.
RedHat revenues are about $500mln. Novel around $1bln, mostly from legacy products, not SuSE. Microsoft is $16bln. Add up all the open source vendors together and they don't even make a dent in the revenues of MS.
If you look at RedHat, while their revenues have been growing fast, their profits have been falling.
Windows server sales $4.8bln last quarter. Unix server sales $4.9 bln. Linux server sales fell to $1.8bln. Unix Linux combined make up less than half of server sales, and that's fighting it's way back.
As I said earlier, Oracle will likely push Oracle DB and will likely continue to push Linux.
You're entitled to your opinion, but you're probably wrong.
Oracle will definately push Oracle DB, it's their main earner. They will support Linux but will likely push Solaris. If they were going to push Linux they would have bought RedHat, because Linux to Oracle means RedHat.
I'm not talking Linux developers here, I'm talking RedHat developers. It's an important distinction.
RedHat is a lot more than just the Linux kernel, which you know, but I'm stating here so that I can reduce any confusion of what I'm talking about.
RedHat's biggest accomplishment hasn't been anything they did with the kernel. It's been the ISV and IHV support that they were able to get. That's what allowed RedHat to penetrate into the corporate data center.
That's not going to be something any fork will be able to accomplish quickly or easily. I don't believe even SuSE has the same level of ISV and IHV support.
I'm not sure how interested they are in J2ME, JavaFX, or any other areas of Java that doesn't effect their existing products.
I would have thought the same thing, but in yesterday's conference call, they stated that Oracle was the leading embedded database which took me by surprise.
With J2ME having such reach in mobile devices, I would think they would care.
First, I like Linux. Right now around me I have one Windows desktop, and an equal mix of Solaris and Linux development servers running Debian and CentOS and even DSL on an old laptop.
You obviously don't understand how stupid some of the things are that people say about Linux around here though. For example, when IBM was in talks to buy Sun, some person replied that RedHat should buy Sun. RedHat and Novel combined couldn't afford to buy half of Sun.
I suspect that Oracle is going to allow Solaris to be EQUALLY supported
When you're customers are choosing Solaris over Linux, you don't allow Solaris to be supported, it's not your choice. If you want to stay in business and make money, you do what your customers want.
They believe that Linux is the way to break MS's monopoly since it has such traction.
And that's the wrong way to do it and it's been failing.
First, Linux didn't have traction. Unix had traction but MS has been eating into that market.
Linux went after the low hanging fruit, the Unix market since it was more compatible with Unix than MS.
Meanwhile MS has been eating into the server market.
The right way to do it would have been to use Linux as a way to stabilize or grow the Unix share in the marketplace against MS and carve out a bigger piece for itself in that space. Instead, they decided to attack the Unix space and spread the same type of FUD that MS does.
So in the end, Linux is gaining share against Unix, but it's growing share in a constantly shrinking slice of the pie.
You can't really buy what Redhat has worked to gain over the years.
Yeah you can. It's a publicly traded company. You don't even need their permission to buy it.
And it would only cost you $3.3 billion - the $1 billion in cash and short term investments you'd acquire when you did. But $2.3 billion for a company with only a half billion in annual revenues, 76 million in annual net income (with no income growth despite dramatic revenue growth) doesn't seem worth it.
It's not that you can't buy RedHat. You don't want to.
You can't buy Linux, but you sure as hell can buy RedHat and the developers won't be jumping ship. Especially in this economic climate where raising money for a RedHat fork that can compete with the RedHat brand isn't likely.
And you sure as hell can sell RedHat as a lot of insiders have been doing lately. If you can sell something, you can buy it.
Please tell me, that English is not your first language.
English is my first language (gee maybe second but it's very close I learned two at the same time). Slashdot isn't my first priority and I'm usually doing one or more other things while I'm typing. It's common for me to stop in the middle of a sentence then come back in mid thought which screws things up.
I type pretty fast but I still think faster than I type and that gets in the way too.
If I took the time to proofread, I'd spot the errors. But commenting on Slashdot, just isn't that important to me and I couldn't care less about the grammatical errors as long as the underlying message gets across.
...long live the Larry Borg.
Let's just stick with Ming the Merciless. It gives the same effect and the Sillicon Valley maids don't have to create new place cards.
This is bad news for anyone who uses Java (esp. NetBeans), OpenOffice or MySQL, though. Particularly anyone invested in having their java code work the same on every platform.
OpenOffice.org will be fine. Gives something for Ellison to go after MSOffice with (Larry no likey Bill).
MySQL, I wouldn't be toooo worried their. They've been good with InnoDB and MySQL isn't even on the same level of Oracle Express or whatever it was called. MySQL expands Oracle's presence and can get their salespeople in the door. I think last year, Sun got MySQL's revenus up to $88mln while it was only around $50 before they bought them (and dropped to around $35 after they bought them.)
I'm more worried about PostgreSQL. Now that's an opensource database that could nip at Oracle's heels. Sun has been a proponent of PostgreSQL, hiring a developer, supporting it on Solaris, including it in their OS, donating hardware for the pgsql developers to test scalability. I hope Oracle doesn't stop that and realizes they can use that to their advantage as well. I'm going to say it again. Had Sun not bought MySQL, and instead focused on PostgreSQL, they could probably still be independent.
As for Java, the JCP isn't as broken as everyone thinks and Java is so big now and Oracle so invested in Java, it wouldn't be smart for Oracle to mess with it too much.
I didn't see it coming, but I'm a bit dissapointed with myself for that.
In hindsight, it's the obvious choice.
Who is Oracle's biggest Competitor? IBM.
What is Oracle lacking when it goes head to head with IBM? Hardware.
When a customer says "we're going with IBM because they can deliver a whole solution" Oracle can now say "So can we!".
"all reports I've read in the press indicate that Oracle has been handling the mergers very well."
*cough*peoplesoft fiasco*cough*
I'm talking post merger. Merger might not be the right word in that case. It was pretty much a hostile takeover with Peoplesoft kicking and screaming as well as legal battles to get it done.
But a year after the Oracle Peoplesoft merger things seemed to be going smoothly.
Even now, years later, while they've been working on consolidating the PeopleSoft and JD Edwards products, they haven't abandoned support for the legacy systems people are using.
It will probably be just like every other merger of companies that should fit well together... it won't.
Oracle has been buying up a lot of companies recently. The general consensus seems to be that they've had a good merger and acquisition strategy and that they have pulled them all off well.
Oracle has always been bullying Microsoft.
Larry Ellison want's to create the world's largest software company and dethrone MS. He's tried everything including support for nettops.
Considering MS gained dominance through an operating system and an office suite, what Ellison did with just a database is quite remarkable.
They have since grown their software portfolio to include enterprise applications, application servers and middleware.
Now with Sun, their getting an OS, a great development platform and a lot of other nice things in addition to the hardware business.
Oracle's revenue after the Sun acquisition should be close to Microsoft's and close to half of IBM and HP's.
Sun was only about a quarter of the size of IBM and HP, it's two biggest competitors and wasn't doing too bad considering who they were up against. And like I said, Oracle wasn't too shabby in the software world.
The combination of the two, if done properly, should really be fierce. Oracle has been buying a lot of companies in the past few years and all reports I've read in the press indicate that Oracle has been handling the mergers very well.
I thought Cisco would have been the ideal buyer for Sun and I didn't even consider Oracle. Now that the merger has been announced and I had time to think about it, I couldn't think of a much better buyer of Sun.
The two companies have so much in common. People that deploy Oracle tend to do it on Solaris/SPARC more than any other platform and that's been the case for a long time. So the companies have had a strong relationship over the years. Not always great, but overall pretty good. The big knock was when Ellison decided to switch developer workstations to Linux from Solaris, which may not have been a good idea since Solaris/SPARC deployments still beat linux deployments for Oracle.
Here you have two CEO's that hate MS, and want to dominate IBM. We're in for some interesting times.
While I don't hate Linux, the linux fanbois on here have been getting on my nerves so let me throw in this barb.
When IBM was rumored to be in talks with Sun, rumors were going around that Oracle was looking to buy RedHat.
When the opportunity to buy Sun, Oracle chose them over RedHat. RedHat wouls probably have cost them only $2bln compared to the $5.6bln it's going to cost to buy Sun. So suck it! :)
whoooooosh!
You only get to "whoooosh" when someone makes a joke and someone doesn't get it.
Whooosh doesn't apply when someone botches a joke.
And while I'm at it, let me just add, cause you people have been using wooosh too often lately. Something funny could be a stupid phrase, but just because you say something stupid, doesn't mean it's funny.
It's like that old mathematical explanation of sets. For example, all mom's are female, but your mom's a fat skank.
Get it?
Ah, the infamous "common knowledge". I will tell you that any of Sun's recent SEC filings are pretty pathetic, and SPARC has done so well that the company is for sale. That should tell you something.
Maybe you don't know how to Google so let me help you out. http://www.slideshare.net/earningsreport/sun-microsystems-q2-2009-earnings-releases there's a slide with a breakdown of systems billings by category.
SPARC ENT: 578mln
SPARC CMT: 338mln
x64: 176mln
Other: 156mln
That's 916mln for Sparc based servers
Hardware/OS Support billings were around $900mln for the quarter. When you consider most of the hardware sold was for Sparc servers (Storage was only around $500mln), it's safe to assume that most of the hardware/OS support was related to SPARC servers.
That's an argument by precedent: "The sun has risen every morning, therefore it will always rise."
CEOs should be forward looking, not backwards looking. Does SPARC really stand a chance against the x86 world at this point, especially as the x86 world is beginning to embrace PLD and GPU computing as well?
No. It's a statement of fact. Ellison tried to be forward-looking back in 2002 when he decided to switch the Oracle developers workstations from Solaris to Linux. He expected Linux to be the top deployment platform for Oracle. Because if you're smart, you develop your application on the most popular system your customers use.
Here we are seven years later and that hasn't happened. Either he was too forward looking, or he was wrong. Both are bad. CEOs aren't supposed to take big leaps with a company that large. They need to take big steps, with one leg firmly planted in the present.
As for open source databases, I use them a lot. In the past couple of years, only PostgreSQL and I have been deploying it on Solaris/x86 on whitebox servers with great results.
When I've deployed Oracle, it's been on Solaris/SPARC, but I know some big companies that are deploying on Linux as well.
I don't know the exact numbers of Oracle vs DB2 on AIX, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was close to evenly split. If Oracle wasn't the primary DB for HP servers is likely MSSQL, unless you're talking only their unix servers in which case I would be surprised if it's not Oracle. In that space, the only real choices are Oracle and DB2 and you would expect HP to not want to have their customers give money to their biggest competitor.
I don't understand the general animosity towards Sun around here. Generally people tend to root for the underdog, and I believe that to be especially true in the geek world.
Sun's biggest competitors are IBM and HP. In that instance, Sun is clearly David. But people want to pit Solaris vs Linux and in that case Sun is Goliath in terms of company size and revenues.
I think it's unfortunate because of all the work Sun did with open source.
You'll notice he didn't name Sparc as a reason to buy Sun.
But he did mention that Solaris/SPARC was the most popular choice for deploying Oracle DB.
It wouldn't make much sense to buy a company and kill your customer's favorite product.
Plus, Oracle want's to compete with IBM and they need SPARC to go head to head with IBM's power servers. Oracle doesn't sell IBM servers directly. If you want to deploy Oracle on AIX/Power, you're going to have to go to IBM first to get the hardware and their salespeople will try to talk you into DB2. That's what Oracle wants to avoid. Now customers can come straight to Oracle and get the hardware and software. With Solaris and SPARC under Ellison's roof, you can bet that there will be the impression that Oracle will run better on Solaris than AIX. That impression is already there today really.
Plus, when you look at how Oracle releases for Solaris/x86 are so slow, it shows they have a preference for Solaris/SPARC.
In addition, up until a few years ago, there was only Solaris and Solaris/x86, Solaris implied Solaris/SPARC.
The real question is:
No, the real question is what happened to Don't Pod, Don't Touch?
Two little details: First, there's a SPARC version of Linux, though Sun doesn't support it. (Cannonical does.)
I had Debian running on an old SPARC box a few years ago, but Linux on SPARC is not a viable alternative for enterprise deployments. While Cannonical may support it, it's not going to be supported by most ISV's. I don't even believe Oracle has support for Ubuntu. In the enterprise data center, if you're talking linux, you're generally talking RedHat. That's where the ISV support is. RedHat no longer supports SPARC.
Second, most of Sun's x86 servers end up running Linux or Windows.
I've said this in other threads. Oracle gets deployed on Solaris/SPARC more than on Linux according to what Ellison said today. In addition to Oracle, Solaris enterprise applications. Solaris is still viable but Solaris/x86 adoption has been slow for a number of reasons, including Sun's own sales people. A number of ISVs, such as SAP support Solaris/x86.
Plus, Intel's work with OpenSolaris indicates that there's a lot of good stuff in Solaris or coming into it.
There's a lot of potential there and Oracle should work harder to get more Solaris/x86 adoption to help drive sales in the higher margin SPARC servers. It seems that some Sun sales people were afraid to do that, thinking it would further cut into their SPARC sales.
It doesn't matter that Sun's been selling x86 hardware without Solaris. At least people know that sun is now selling x86 hardware, which took a lot of people a long time to realize.
Source please?
Read any of Sun's SEC filings, press releases, blogs, news stories about Sun, etc. It's pretty much common knowledge.
My point is that Oracle is a software company, and Sun has several software assets that Oracle would like to control.
Oracle is not just a software company any more. They are as much a services company and want to expand that aspect of their business. Adding hardware to the mix allows them to become an all in one shop, like IBM.
It'll be interesting to see if IBM will tolerate Oracle stewardship of Java, since Java is so strategic to IBM and Oracle is a major competitor against DB2.
With Java being open sourced and the JCP being fairly open and Java being very important to Oracle, even more so now with Sun in the mix, they should have no interest in screwing up Java.
Oracle figured out the cost benefits of x86 Linux servers a long time ago, I'll be surprised if they push a proprietary architecture at this point.
Ellison said today that Solaris/SPARC was the most popular choice for Oracle deployments. He's been pushing Oracle/Linux for years now and it's still only #2. Why would he continue to go against his customers?
So why is there still no Oracle 11g for Solaris/x86, when its already been released for most of the other major platforms
Probably because there isn't much demand for Oracle on Solaris/x86 right now.
In the conference call, they mentioned that Solaris/SPARC was the most popular choice and Linux was second.
What's to say down the road, now that Oracle owns Solaris, Solaris/x86 might not get better treatment from Oracle once it's in it's stable. Customers obviously like the Solaris/Oracle combination so I can't see why Oracle on Solaris/x86 support shouldn't improve.
When Oracle customers started switching to Linux, DTrace didn't exist.
Well, I see no reason for someone blogging at Intel, that was part of the migration away from Solaris to Linux, to lie to benefit Sun. Maybe he got the date wrong but there's nothing in the timeline to make it impossible.
Development of DTrace started in 2001 with a working prototype available in 2002. It's not hard to imagine that Oracle developers would have early access to it.
We're not talking about Oracle customers, but the in house developers that were building Oracle.
Sun has been tanking it for years. Hardware sales are down; people don't give a flying fig about sun's servers.
Sun has close to $14 billion in annual sales, mostly related to sparc servers.
That's a whole lotta figs.
Oracle's DB is the market leader and they have a good appserver and middleware.
Oracle is now a complete solutions provider that can go head to head with IBM. Add to that the hardware sales that go to IBM/HP for Oracle's many products like PeopleSoft now going to Oracle instead...
This will hurt IBM. It probably won't kill them, but they're going to have some serious competition.
HP doesn't offer as many solutions as the Oracle/Sun merger, but HP has been eating into IBMs market.
Safra Katz (Oracle President under Ellison) is saying that he can make Sun's hardware business profitable. That's a credible claim.
I'm surprised more companies weren't interested in buying Sun. They have over $13 billion dollars in revenue. A little bit of fine tuning in the business could mean huge profits.
Google would have made more sense (though they're a Python shop)
Google uses a lot of Java. AdSense/AdWords, Blogger, Feedburner, are the ones I know of. Their top three languages are Python, Java and C.
I think Sun Studio/JDeveloper might merge and NetBeans will still go on as the open source base/entry level solution.
Why do you find more likely a merger of a desktop company with a server company, than the merger of two complementary server companies.
For the foreseeable future, nobody is going to pry the corporate desktop market away from Microsoft.
But in the corporate data center, merging the most popular enterprise database (Oracle), the most mature, advanced and popular Unix OS (Solaris/SPARC) and matched hardware, along with Java app servers and middleware to go head to head with IBM Global Services is going to be very profitable.
They would NEVER niche themselves into a complete black box product.
Uhm... That's exactly what they said they WOULD do in the conference call.
The market is not going to move back to Solaris.
According to Oracle, the market never moved away from Solaris/SPARC, it's still beats Linux for Oracle deployements.
Where do you get your information from?