On 09/ 7/10 09:51 PM, Erik Trimble wrote:
Honestly, (and I'm not speaking in any way as an Oracle insider, or
from any inside knowledge), the question is not "Will Solaris
Survive?", the real question is "Will Solaris continue to be a General
Purpose Computing OS/platform?"
Oracle (pre-Sun) was massively invested in Solaris as their primary
development OS for the DB products (that is, Oracle did development on
Solaris, then ported the fixes to other platforms). I don't think
that's changed. Now that they own Solaris, I can't imaging that
anything but improving the Oracle DB/Solaris coupling is on their
minds. Solaris also provides some real nice Enterprise Storage
possibilities, plus some other vertical integration opportunities.
The question here is if Oracle is willing (or interested) in keeping
the ISV market for Solaris alive and well. That's what will keep
Solaris going as a General Purpose OS (i.e. one where I buy some
hardware, put Solaris on it, then run random things). Otherwise, it's
going to move into a "bundle" concept, where you buy a thing
(appliance, pre-configured software, etc.) to perform a specific task,
and, oh, by the way, the underlying OS is Solaris. Virtualization,
Storage, DataBase, Java Containers are all areas where Oracle is
bundling Solaris with an app to sell a solution.
The Bundle concept can be massively profitable, and maintain a
significant competitive advantage over build-it-yourself solutions.
However, without specifically courting and maintaining ISV
relationships, Solaris will not be able to avoid complete
marginalization and not-so-far-away death as a general-purpose
platform. It's a matter of where Oracle wants to make money, and if
they value the extra revenue that being a GP-OS brings, vs the effort
it requires to maintain this presence.
The above makes sense, except I keep thinking that Oracle stated they're
going to invest more money into Solaris than Sun did, so maybe there is
room for a General Purpose Computing OS/Platform.
Paul
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