Pissing away money and talent to go chasing after AWS and Azure in their race to the bottom seems absolutely pointless. A reasonable guess would be consolidation of OS and platform, what company really has the luxury of two operating systems and two platforms?
Do we have enough of Solaris to implement key features in Oracle Linux, or is the book closed for things like ZFS? We can do on prem engineered systems and storage profitably, why kill proven income to chase the cloud.
Because the cloud will have worse margins than commodity hardware, its a race to the bottom.
Also Oracle is so late to the game and the efforts are relitivly pathetic.
The master plan is simple. On prem HW and SW businesses are in decline. Everyone wants to rent not buy. Is this difficult to understand?
@1azq has it right. There is no long term strategy for the company. The strategy is short term for executives' stock portfolios. Watch their insider trading reports to see what they really think about the long term. It isn't beating AWS and Azure at the commodity game
The irony in all this is that Oracle cancelled the Sun Cloud which was launched at the same time as AWS. Had Oracle continued the investment in the Sun Cloud then it wouldn't be AWS that was feeding the universe, but Sun Cloud. Now Oracle is playing catch up and failing.
Killing Sun Cloud is perhaps the biggest mistake that Oracle ever made as they blew 100s of billions of dollars to other suppliers.
Run oracle into the ground following the HP blueprint, manipulate financial reporting to boost share price as long as you can, them get out when you've s---ed the company dry. Go on to destroy the next company and make $100's of Mollions doing it. Nice work if you can get it.
"Why do you say that Oracle killed SPARC? They will still offer SPARC in the Cloud and that is a BIB differentiator."
because: 1. all SPARC dev is gone, M8 is the last SPARC cpu (maybe some bumps in freq, but no new uarch) 2. SPARC cloud is a (bad) joke, not a real offering 3. Oracle main offering in the cloud (bare metal and xaaS) is x86-based 4. Oracle has just presented x7-c line that is meant only for OPC (not for customers), is based on skylake and includes an nvidia accellerator for analytics and the like.
SC would rather spend money to build a high school in front of her office than invest in SPARC. This is Oracle's Master plan.
BIB differentiator
Good one.
WTF is a BIB differentiator? And why would the hardware or chipset make any difference in IAAS or SAAS?
Isn't the whole point of IAAS and SAAS that infrastructure details such as chipset and hardware implementation details are abstracted away from their consumers?
Why would SPARC help the cloud? Who cares whats under the saas platform?
Why do you say that Oracle killed SPARC? They will still offer SPARC in the Cloud and that is a BIB differentiator.
For the life of me, I can't figure out the master plan. O has never played in the commodity space. Why now?
LE always wanted to be #1. O will never be #1 in commodity cloud. SPARC could have been his differentiator.
Killing SPARC and Solaris is the death knell for the company. It got to the point that only Oracle was buying the premium engineered systems, as cloud offerings, and apparantly could not compete there. Now its selling cloud offerings on x86 platforms like everyone else. And trying to do at a premium price so that Larry can keep his Hawaiin island and carbon fiber racing yacht. This ain't gonna work people.
ITS ALL ABOUT THE STOCK PRICE!!!!
you are right, makes no sense to do so for us...
aws and azure can use their market cap to finance this endless race until everyone else is out. Keep in mind its not only about the cloud, they are piggybacking with everything else - from voice, to services...
All of this is awkward for us, looks like a race to the bottom. But aws and azure (app engine too) are looking at this from a small customer / consumer standpoint - we are always looking things from a fortune 500 customer stand point - thats why it will never work for us since they can cross to our turf, we cannot all of the sudden cross to small enterprise and consumer turf. We dont know how to market and sell there, our compensation model does not work there, we dont have pricing strategy for them, we do not build our product for them.
Typing this on my phone - excause typos please