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Sun shops unnerved by Oracle Alpha man

It's open season on customers running Sun Microsystems. On Tuesday -the day before Oracle was due to announce which Sun products it's keeping and their roadmaps - Sun nemesis IBM's tried once more to exploit lingering uncertainty over Sun's products that's been generated by the Oracle purchase. IBM's updated Migration Factory …

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Anonymous Coward
Headmaster

Self serving

"Martin Mutch, Rocela chief executive, said it's the complexity of Oracle's licensing that makes Sun customers feel like they're about to lose control to the database giant."

To be fair, Rocela (clever re-arrangement of a well known vendors name) make their money by showing Oracle customers how to save money on their overcomplicated Oracle licenses.

Oracle license complexity is what powers their business - anything that makes more complexity or fear about complexity is good news for Rocela.

amanfromMars 1

Nothing Lives Forever ....

"He noted Oracle's rambunctious and Alpha-male CEO Larry Ellison is also preying on customers' minds, with people gripped by a love-hate relationship with the man. Mutch said that while Ellison is known for turning out "good product" and having a good management structure in place "there's always that sense of what's he going to do next?"."

Errr... methinks that makes more sense if it reads ...."there's always that sense of not knowing what's he going to do next?"

Normally the health of any enterprise and a indicator of where it going [either up or down] is closely reflected in the actions and abilities of whoever or whatever [for it may be another corporation] is recognised and accepted as the logical successor should Larry sail off into the Sun Set for some Professional Hedonism/Dedicated R&R, although who is to say that such is not the Present :-) or pop his clogs. A Will normally reveals such Wishes if there are any Continuity Plans at all.

Pandy06269

Solaris

The day the merger was announced I started making plans to move my systems away from Solaris. Oracle already have Enterprise Linux, what will they gain from maintaining two very similar OSs?

I can see them moving the good stuff from Solaris (like ZFS and SMF) into their EL distribution and scrapping it.

The last thing IT shops is to be left with an OS that's unsupported and no longer developed - which is why we're now 100% Ubuntu, and probably better off for it.

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward
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Re: Solaris

Since more than 1/3 of ORCL's pre-Sun-takeover customers run Solaris on SPARC, why do you think Larry would go and piss them off by ditching Solaris, or SPARC? If you'd tuned in to today's webcast you'd be reassured. But since you've already ditched Solaris based on totally unfounded fears there's no reason for you to want any facts about what Oracle's actually going to do.

DJUNIX
Linux
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Basically did the same thing

We actually started to plan for the migration in late 2008 (our move was a good one considering a few months later Sun was looking for a buyer). We still have some Sun boxes left (a couple of T2's, M4k's, and M5k's) but the older Sun boxes are now gone. Most likely in a few years our Sun gear will be gone (need to get the ROI out of the boxes that still work fine).

We went with open source for some (either RedHat or CentOS) to replace the Solaris apps/infrastructure systems and AIX on our EMR and ERP. We even converted some of the old SUN app's to Windows (not a windows fan but for some apps it made sense) .

Anyways, not sure if we convert back to Oracle/SUN, but you never know. I remember back in mid 90's I was helping convert off of AIX to Solaris. Now some of it it's back the other way.

Pigeon
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FUD

If you haven't got a team of Contract specialists, life is easier moving to cheaper systems with no armlock. Only FUDproof shops would think of putting themselves in the clutches of cold blue-blooded IBM. You can stick with Solaris if you want stability, and at least have the choice of cheaper 3rd party support and non-Vendor hardware upgrades.

Don't forget that moving Oracle to a new platform is mucho expensive, but then, so are the costs of all those itinerant code-corrupting hit-and-run programmers. Takes some working out.

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

All Larry cares about is maintenance fees

1) Oracle makes more money on maintenance than product sales

2) A large percentage of their customers run on Solaris on SPARC

3) if SPARC dies quickly customers will move to Power and Nehalem

4) customer licenses will plummet

Paula Smith

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