On 5/30/2010 11:03 PM, Edward Martinez wrote:
I'm beginning to get a hunch why Oracle is mum about OpenSolaris. Can't stop
the sinking ship
"Oracle needs to make Sun's once-dominant UNIX server business a success to justify
the $7.4 billion price tag attached to the acquisition. Critics of the deal noted from
the start that this wouldn't be easy, given the steady market-share declines that
proprietary UNIX systems had been seeing over the past decade at the hands of cheaper
systems running Linux and Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) Windows, and powered by Intel
(Nasdaq: INTC) Xeon and AMD (NYSE: AMD) Opteron processors."
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2010/05/28/the-sun-isnt-shining-for-oracle.aspx
"Like Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, or IBM freezing development of their respective
Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX platforms. It is not hard to imagine Oracle or IBM selling off
their server businesses to focus on software and services, either, letting someone else
do the engineering and design and designating them as hardware resellers and operating
system developers. If the economy had gotten truly bad enough - or takes a double dip -
you can bet a money-losing Oracle or IBM hardware business would be put up on the auction
block."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/27/idc_q1_2010_server_nums/
And it seems Oracle is about to kill SUN servers running AMD CPUs
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/27/oracle_spikes_opterons/
That's all rampant speculation, and *BAD* speculation at that. Oracle
is in it's fiscal-year-end Quiet Period this month, so absolutely
NOTHING has been going out as far as product statements or anything else
like that. Oracle is *extremely* tight-lipped around fiscal periods
(expect similar silence around quarterly earnings times).
Frankly, if Oracle got nothing more than the IP out of Sun, and entirely
gave up building any hardware except that which they turned into Oracle
Database Appliances, they got a *steal* for under $8 billion. Sun's
patent portfolio alone is worth more than that, IMHO.
I love the Register for sarcasm (and the occasional biting insight), but
really, they're just slightly better at reporting than The Daily
Mirror. It's a gossip/rumor tabloid for the techies. It's also about
as accurate as Slashdot is.
And the Motley Fool isn't whom I would be taking advice from on
technical businesses prospects. I'd trust them for analyzing how a tech
company is being run, but they don't know the tech business at all.
They've been trying to figure out why anyone still sells mainframes for
over a decade. I think the second section of their article ("Does
Oracle have a clue?") is right up their alley as far as expertise, and
makes some valid (and insightful) observations, but the rest shows a
significant misunderstanding of the server market, and worse, not
understanding how the acquisition affected Sun's sales prospects (I
mean, of course revenue is down for Q1Y10 - who wants to buy a $1m SPARC
box right before Oracle takes over? Wait 3 months and find out what
you're getting...)
Also, the high-margin "proprietary UNIX" systems market hasn't been
losing sales volume (in fact, that market segment revenue is
consistently up, year-over-year), though they are losing volume market
share. And, folks seem to conveniently forget that Solaris is really the
only Proprietary UNIX (and, that's a misnomer, in any case) THAT RUNS ON
x64 HARDWARE. So, yes, total market share (as number of systems sold)
of x64 systems is up over SPARC/POWER/et al., but it's not like Solaris
isn't a candidate to run on those. Can't say the same for AIX/HPUX.
--
Erik Trimble
Java System Support
Mailstop: usca22-123
Phone: x17195
Santa Clara, CA
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