On 5/31/2010 12:05 AM, Edward Martinez wrote:
I don't know, those number are from Gartner and they don't look like
speculation,they can be correct
"The server segments varied as well. x86-based servers grew 25.3 percent in units
and 32.1 percent in revenue. RISC/Itanium Unix servers were not positive, with declines
of 28.5 percent in units and 26.9 percent in vendor revenue, and the 'other' CPU
category, which is primarily mainframes, fell 15.1 percent in revenue for the
quarter,"
http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1375038
This was driven by several factors, one major one is that Itanium sales
have effectively stopped, and that Japan more-or-less canceled their big
supercomputer project, which has been on life support for quite some
time. IBM also was a big factor, as they're in the middle of rolling
out a new product selection, which pushes sales back. Also, given the
extreme pressures that the financial crisis in Europe has had on
purchasing, I'm not surprised. That said, I use YEARLY numbers, not
quarterly ones, as there's too much "what happened yesterday"
fluctuations in them for reliable predictions.
"Oracle Sun server hardware put up poor numbers in the first quarter this year,
diving below Fujitsu and into fifth place."
"Oracle server hardware revenue dropped almost 40% compared with Sun's first quarter
last year, according to numbers released by Gartner. The freefall has left the company –
which just closed its acquisition with Sun Microsystems in the first quarter – with less
than 6% market share in terms of revenue and only 2% in terms of server shipments. HP is
the leader, followed by IBM, Dell and Fujitsu."
"Every server hardware vendor had double-digit increases over last year in
shipments except for Oracle, which saw an almost 30% drop. Oracle clearly has major
ground to make up if it wants to be a contender in the server hardware business.
For more on Oracle hardware decisions"
Yup. Uncertainty of what Oracle was going to do with the Sun server line
pretty much killed sales last year. This is old (bad) news.
"Gartner also reported a steep 27% revenue decline in the Unix market, which is
where Oracle has said it wants to focus with its Sun Sparc server hardware."
http://searchoracle.techtarget.com/news/2240019082/Oracle-Sun-server-hardware-sales-nosedive
Once again, quarterly revenue drop was due mostly to one-off events.
And, as pointed out elsewhere, hardware revenue for this market segment
is a significantly smaller chunk of total revenue than for the x64
market. That is, percentage wise, the total amount spent on the
hardware for the UNIX market is significantly less vs the x64 market.
For the UNIX market, you often see up to 10x the hardware costs spent in
support, service, integration, additional software stack, etc. You
don't get anywhere near that multiplier for x64 systems, where hardware
costs are a *much* greater portion of the total budget being spent.
Put another way: I'm better off selling (1) $500k UNIX system than
(100) $10k x64 systems, because I'll almost certainly be able to sell
$2m in service/software/etc for the UNIX system, whereas I'll likely not
be able to sell more than $100-200k in add-ons for the x64 gear.
To quote:
“Challenges remain in this segment as the longer sales cycles that we
see for these platforms are currently compounded by significant product
refreshes for both IBM and HP,” said Mr. O’Connell. “The integration of
Sun into Oracle is an additional factor that complicates current levels
of demand. We expect demand in this segment to improve during 2010, but
the vendors in this segment will be facing increasing challenges from
Windows and Linux platforms.”
This isn't to minimize the damage that the Oracle acquisition did to
Sun's server sales. It's been pretty horrendous. But sales of the
Solaris ecosystem are a big part of being able to recover from that, and
to suggest that Oracle dumping (Open)Solaris is a good bet towards
increasing profitability faster is shortsighted and frankly exhibits
considerable business market ignorance.
--
Erik Trimble
Java System Support
Mailstop: usca22-123
Phone: x17195
Santa Clara, CA
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