Does SPARC make money and if yes, what's the margin.
We have opposing opinions on this - let's discuss here...
15 replies (most recent on top)
Exadata is the best thing Oracle has along with the database. The problem is everyone is moving away from Oracle databases. I have not seen an application built on Oracle in at least the last 3 years. It's all NoSQL and Hadoop or projects in that ecosystem. Oracle database is legacy. It will die a very slow death. Oracle has an impossible task in the cloud. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Workday are just absolutely crushing them.
i'm not the other guy you are talking to, but i believe he is a customer and not internal.
there are many oracle clouds around the world running many different services. all of the ones i know are x86.
sparc only exists for large customers that have invested heaily for decades to be sparc shops.
if their buying habits dont support the costs of developers salaries for solaris, well then...
You mean we as in oracle data centers? Is sparc the backbone of oracle cloud?
We ditched Sun SPARC hardware and Solaris years ago. We had a few big machines that supported a large number of logins each. Now, everyone has an x86_64 box faster than that old big iron. If you want fast big servers, probably AIX and POWER fit you better.
The question is will oracle really fill the data center with thousands of sparc servers.
Just look at the improvements AWS is announcing, why buy oracle hw?
Customers are not stupid if it's worth it they will buy. Many reasons why oracle hw is in decline. One is they hate oracle licensing and customer service.
Good post, agree with everything except:
SPARC and Exa are our best products but they are still not top tier
yes or even less
if you are trying to sell a SPARC server that costs 100,000 list price, it will need to be discounted down to 50,000 for the customer to feel it is competitve and logical compared to what performance they could get with x86 or AWS
and then from the company's point of view, that $50,000 net price brings in only $25,000 or less of profit after manufacturing, and thats before they pay the sales team's commission (cost of sales)
our HW revenues globally are shrinking according to every 10Q we file. SPARC and Exa are our best products but they are still not top tier
Are you saying the margin is 50% after the heavy discount? Sounds to me like market does not support the prices. Be ready to have an even smaller install base as AWS wins more of the legacy business.
As someone who actually sells SPARC, the margin is good (50%)... the issue is that we have a very small install base and we have to discount heavily for those customers we still have.
and then dont forget they will calculate your commission incorrectly anyway...
nice try
It's obvious oracle does not allow the spread of layoff info to it's employees! That's why we come here and same reason you are here. Why are you here if you work for oracle? Same reason all of us are here.
If the product is not making a healthy margin, Oracle would stop/kill it. Unlike Sun, Oracle is not in business to loose money.
let's not? if you were oracle you would already know the answers to these questions.