Acquisition day T + 5: We learn more
By joe
- 3 minutes read - 439 wordsOk, looks like I was dead on right on some aspects, and likely pie in the sky with others. Here is where I was right. This acquisition was, and is, about Java and MySQL. From The Register yesterday:
Yup. Makes sense.
But also stated …
… which they have to do to prevent Sun’s hardware sales from tanking pre-close. We know this. And they are going to keep making these noises up until the close. If not a little after the close. Until the pink slips come. Whats interesting is that some of the rumors we had heard appear to be confirmed, with more information.
So why would Oracle suddenly decide to keep the hardware? Doesn’t make sense. Here is where I seem to have gotten it wrong. OpenOffice. While the Reg claims it is years behind Microsoft office, I respectfully disagree. It is actually quite good. We use it for most of our work. I suspect the Reg folks haven’t tried using 3.0.
This is basically saying it is dead. Sad. But we do have fairly good confirmation on HPC. It is indeed over.
but not just HPC
This is good, in that it suggests that Ellison has a good grasp of the limitations of the cloud. There are quite a few. He will help people build them, and provide virtualization (remember VirtualBox? looks like its going to get ramped up). Its bad in that customers building business cases around HPC and/or cloud technologies from Sun are basically SOL. What does that include on the HPC side? Lustre. But of course, since Sun is a hardware company, they need to say something about the hardware. Which they do.
Porting and tuning code for hardware is very, very different than organizing and executing plans, articulating value propositions to customers for the hardware, and supporting the same. Moreover, as Dell, HP, and IBM among all the others reselling Oracle are looking at this, they are wondering what they can do to offset this possible onslaught. IBM is working with EnterpriseDB. This is a just-announced relationship (sorry can’t find linky right now). I am sure Dell will do similar things with EnterpriseDB and Greenplum. HP will do similar things. Oracle needs to quietly reassure their partners that they are not trying to compete with their partners. Their discussion on storage suggests they are going to focus at the higher end. Doubtful that x45x0 will continue, as well as other things. So there we have it. Some clarity, some nebulous information, designed not to scare customers away.. But in the end, we see the writing on the wall for lots of technology.