[osol-discuss] SUN not doing well under Oracle.

[Erik Trimble]

On 5/31/2010 1:16 AM, Edward Martinez wrote:
>>
>>
>> Once again, quarterly revenue drop was due mostly to
>> one-off events.
>> And, as pointed out elsewhere, hardware revenue for
>> this market segment
>> is a significantly smaller chunk of total revenue
>> than for the x64
>> market.  That is, percentage wise, the total amount
>> spent on the
>> hardware for the UNIX market is significantly less vs
>> the x64 market.
>> For the UNIX market, you often see up to 10x the
>> hardware costs spent in
>> support, service, integration, additional software
>> stack, etc.  You
>> don't get anywhere near that multiplier for x64
>> systems, where hardware
>> costs are a *much* greater portion of the total
>> budget being spent.
>> Put another way:  I'm better off selling (1) $500k
>> UNIX system than
>> (100) $10k x64 systems, because I'll almost certainly
>> be able to sell
>> $2m in service/software/etc for the UNIX system,
>> whereas I'll likely not
>> be able to sell more than $100-200k in add-ons for
>> the x64 gear.
>>      
> I'm trying to understand, if this is  great  model then why didn't SUN focus only  selling high end SPARC Units  instead of trying to get into the X86 server market?  maybe SUN would still around, Right?
>    

(a) Sun Sales was pretty dysfunctional.  Which comes from leadership at 
the top. Q.E.D.

(b) You may not make the margin in x64 where you do in high-end, but 
it's money you wouldn't otherwise make. It's not a zero-sum game. That 
is, you still make money in x64 sales, and NOT having a x64 department 
will actually cost you sales in the high-end department, as clients want 
to be able to buy a wide variety of things from a single vendor.


Something Oracle is going to have to learn about selling servers is that 
unless they want to sell ONLY pre-packaged appliances, they're going to 
have to carry a rather complete product line.  Many of my sales folks 
were pointing out that Sun was losing sales due to gaps in the 
top-to-bottom product line, whereas HP and IBM could come in and quote a 
total solution for everything, soup-to-nuts.  Which means that Oracle is 
going to need to have desktops, thin clients, workgroup servers, 
department servers, enterprise servers, storage, tape, and the software 
to make it all manageable.  Sun had some gaps in there, plus overdoing 
some other areas (and having a bunch of stuff that I always wondered 
"why are we doing that?").


>> This isn't to minimize the damage that the Oracle
>> acquisition did to
>> Sun's server sales. It's been pretty horrendous.  But
>> sales of the
>> Solaris ecosystem are a big part of being able to
>> recover from that, and
>> to suggest that Oracle dumping (Open)Solaris is a
>> good bet towards
>> increasing profitability faster is shortsighted and
>> frankly exhibits
>> considerable business market ignorance.
>>
>>      
> I was only  suggesting  Oracle has it's hands full at the moment to talk about OpenSolais roadmap,  not  about dumping it.
>   --
>    

As I said before, Oracle isn't talking about OpenSolaris this month 
because it doesn't talk about ANYTHING this month.  That's not to excuse 
the not-so-great job being done before May, but end-of-fiscal-year 
accounts for the silence this month.

Not that I have any special knowledge, but I really expect the 
OpenSolaris 2010.06 announcement and availability to happen shortly 
after Oracle announces Fiscal Year results, which means in a couple of 
days or so.  I'm hoping that enough noise has peculated up through the 
Sales Reps to encourage more (and better) communication around Solaris 
and OpenSolaris thereafter, but I'm also hoping that the community 
hasn't gone so far down the Chicken Little ("The Sky is Falling! The Sky 
is Falling!) hysterical hole that when info is forthcoming, it actually 
is absorbed.

-- 
Erik Trimble
Java System Support
Mailstop:  usca22-123
Phone:  x17195
Santa Clara, CA