The competition is intensifying. Hardware profits are much less than profits in services and software. With the recent entry of Cisco into the server market and Oracle's acquisition of Sun, we pause to think where all this might be going. After all, none of today's big server vendors make most of their money from the hardware itself. IBM makes most of its profit from services. The big money maker at HP is the printer (and the cartridges). Cisco profits from networking hardware. Oracle will likely remain primarily a software company.
What's inside?
The key seems to be integration, and smart marketing. IBM has done well. IBM pulls the hardware through with the software and service out front. Certainly, it was with this in mind when HP bought EDS. Now, Cisco is bundling servers with routers and pushing VDI (Cisco is a VMWare shareholder). Then, there is the telepresence initiative, which according to the Cisco website is now available in over 300 telepresence rooms in 135 cities and more than 40 countries -- welcome to the human network. It will be interesting to see what comes out of the oven when Oracle creates the first SPARC, Solaris/Linux, Java, database, PeopleSoft/Siebel, etc. offering...
Surprise!
As the issues compound for these companies and the competition intensifies, much more than sixpence will be needed. Can they afford to be everything to everybody? Will the server become a loss-leader? With energy costs being considered over a life of use, the notions of grid and utility computing as carriers of metered services are becoming more defined and credible. Ultimately, applications drive adoption, so the real trick for these folks may actually be keeping the four and twenty blackbirds in the pie. We may see more vendor lock-in or we may not...
The Community is the Computer - Go Zig!
4 comments:
Hehe.. when I clicked into the second image I understood better. Is that a children's peom?
Yes, us older folks remember it from our childhood.
Sing a Song of Sixpence...
We just tried to post this answer a few times. We have noticed a few bugs in blogger lately. Our Profile View counter has been stuck for a month. Maybe even Google is struggling under the weight of all the traffic...
BB & RV,
Oracle bought Sun for one reason. Sun just could not capitalize on their technologies, many of which benefit Oracle in multiple ways. They have Solaris, which can scale up to potentially thousands of cores to run Oracle Database on. Remember, they used to build Oracle on Solaris/SPARC.
They have the UltraSPARC processors, which are incredibly multi-threaded and can run Java workloads like the ones WebLogic can push out really well. They have ZFS, which can make backing up and restoring Oracle Database incredibly easy, and allows them to build out their Content Management systems, which they have been attempting to do for years. They have incredibly good NAS technologies, again, which will help blast out data really well.
They did not buy them for StorageTEK. StorageTEK is still in the dark ages compared to what EMC and NetApp are putting out these days. They're good for tapes. EMC, Brocade, and Netapp eat their lunch already.
The future from Oracle is devices like Exadata. They're going to start building vertical market appliances like it for Java workloads on WebLogic, and possibly a version of Exadata running on Solaris X64 or Linux with ZFS instead of PolyServe.
I see them enhancing the SPARC line with Oracle-specific instructions.
However, Oracle's money comes from Oracle Database, WebLogic, Peoplesoft, and JD Edwards. They're going to spend the money to make the most difficult part of the experience of setting up these software packages, performance tuning, less of an issue by throwing custom-tuned hardware and software that can handle immense workloads at it and showing the cost benefit by having less tuning occurring on an ongoing basis.
The next thing that probably will happen will be a greatly enhanced version of their database backup software that can provide snapshotting of live Oracle databases and entire file systems. There will be integration of OCFS2 and ZFS to allow this, and to make a DBA's life incredibly easy.
This is all about the most predatory software house in Silicon Valley doing what Sun or HP couldn't by capitalizing on having the entire stack. Oracle is kill or be killed. HP and Sun were much more laid-back, and Sun is where good software went to die. Now, its perform or die. Say what you want about what an a-hole Larry is, but they put out products that make them billions and don't tolerate slackers for long.
The future of MySQL remains up in the air. Can the leading open source database still thrive when it's controlled by the Oracle? So far, the prognosis doesn't look good.
Post a Comment