Hello Vitaly,
I agree that Oracle should act now.
We loose precious time because of the take over.
I work closely with the Dutch Sun branch but because no forward looking
statements can be made by Sun (Oracle will take over control of the
Dutch branch in July) it is not possible at this time to make strategic
sales plans and request product RFEs. This situation is now in effect
for about a year. It has hold back Dutch Sun Ray sales considerably.
I hope marketing and sales funding will be available after 1 july to
recover the lost sales.
For instance a proper Sun Ray 3 launch event is badly needed with a
proper follow up plan.
The question is: Why should Oracle invest in the Sun Ray VDI infrastructure?
The answer is simple: Because it can be one of the best selling parts of
Oracle's solution stack
In order to be the best selling product it needs customers who want to
buy it.
So what makes it so special that it is the best choice for a customer to
buy?
I can assure you that people who decide on buying 500+ Sun Rays don't
talk about PCoIP, ALP or VDPAU an Xvideo options.
Those people expect "it" to work so they don't get complaints from the
people who work with it.
Because of the fact that Oracle wants an integrated stack, I believe
more effort will be made to make the Sun Ray product work out of the box.
This is needed, but not essential for selling Sun Rays.
What is special about the Sun Ray is the fact that it is a three tier
solution.
No other product can deliver something remotely similar.
The three tiers (Sun Ray - SR server - Windows/Mac/Unix) makes it
possible to hookup different virtualization technologies without
changing anything on the desktop.
If you have 10.000+ desktop this is a mayor advantage!
So you can migrate from Citrix to Windows Terminal Server to VMware to
Virtualbox to Hyper-V to Verde 2.0 to ... what ever and you don't need
to redeploy workstations.
Or you can use all available virtualization technologies at the same
time because some are better in some areas and others are better for
other areas.
I can not predict the shakeout which will happen in virtualization
technologies in the next 10 year. Nor can the customer. So if you are a
smart customer you want to buy a desktop which will support them all.
That is why I would like Oracle to provide uttsc like clients for all
virtualization technologies.
If this can be established then the Sun Ray can be a standard in
desktop/workstations.
If this is the goal, and you can align marketing, sales and product
development to get this done the reward will be tremendous.
Total pc sales in 2010 is estimated at 336 million units. Half are
mobile so I am not sure how Oracle will market the mobile Sun Ray.
So about 168 million are desktops. Let assume 1/3 are business desktops.
This makes 56 million desktops which are replaced every year.
So what should we aim for? I would suggest a modest 10% for a start.
So lets sell 5.6 million Sun Rays a year. At an average revenu of $400
per Sun Ray this would amount to 2.24 Billion dollars annually.
Why should Oracle let this money go to Dell, Wyse, etc if it wants and
can sell the Sun Ray as part of the whole solution stack to their customers!
What can go wrong?
Oracle can decide to only work on a Sun Ray connection to Virtualbox and
Oracle VM.
Then Oracle will place itself on the same level as other thin client
solutions like Vmware/Wyse, Redhat RHEV, Microsoft/Wyse, etc.
If this happens I too believe the Sun Ray will become a niche product
because you have no compelling arguments for top management to buy Sun Rays.
At best you may win a few proof of concepts designed by the IT
department of some small company.
I am an optimistic guy so I hope I can convince Oracle to follow the
right path ;-)
Ivar
Vitaly Tsipris schreef:
Ivar,
You make some good points. However, my feeling is that because for the
past 10 years people only heard of Wyse, Dell and HP, they will not
think that these vendors do not have the history of product development.
Add to it that Dell and HP are a platform of choice for a lot of
customers in their datacenters for servers and sometimes even storage, I
think Oracle/Sun has a steep hill to climb.
I am also concerned about some "reversed opinions" that customers may
have. What I mean by that is a situation where customers keep hearing
about PCoIP and HDX these days and do not realize that PCoIP is very
much like ALP protocol that Sun has had for years. So when we will have
a conversation with them about their VDI project, they will be thinking
"ALP... oh yeah, VMware has had it for a while now" as opposed to
"ALP... Sun had it for while and VMware is just now validating the
advantages of such protocol".
Bottom line is that I think Oracle/Sun need to throw their hat in the
rink as soon as possible. Otherwise, I fear they will be an "also runs"
instead of a leading VDI/thin client solution vendor.
Again, I could be totally wrong here. I am just expressing my concerns
and eager to hear people's opinions.
Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.
Thank you!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Vitaly Tsipris
Systems Engineer
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