back to article French regulators investigate Oracle over Itanium pullout

The Autorité de la concurrence, the French national competition authority, has opened up an investigation into Oracle's decision to stop software development for future versions of Intel's Itanium processor family. HP filed the complaint against Oracle with the French authorities quietly back in July 2011 shortly after the …

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  1. This post has been deleted by its author

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    you got to admire their guts

    revisiting the buyout of Sun.

  3. Ramazan
    Holmes

    @revisiting the buyout of Sun

    By the way, cost of flying an elephant to Moon will be higher than what was paid for Sun
  4. theblackhand
    Devil

    If I understand correctly...

    - Oracles view is that no new Itanium generations will be released with Intel moving customers to the x86 platform

    - HP's view is this breaks contracts signed with customers (either HP or directly with customers) stating Oracle would support the Itanium platform

    As far as I am aware, Intel hasn't released any public statements over the future of Itanium, so this will come down to the judge asking Intel to state what there planned strategy will be.

    I suspect Intel want to kill off Itanium to allow them to focus on ARM as a competitor to x86 systems - Intel could answer quickly and prevent a long drawn out court case that costs HP and Itanium customers.

    As I've said before, HP may win the battle but lose the war regardless of how they handle this. Or they may lose both...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      If I understand correctly

      I don't think Oracle is arguing that Intel won't release a new generation of Itanium. They are just saying that there is a documented plan for the end of Itanium in the near future and they need to give customers appropriate warning when they end support of a platform. Intel will likely release the two Itanium versions under contract which HP has already paid them to create.

      Intel has said that they will continue to support Itanium, are committed... all of the things you would expect them to say about the chip.

      HP doesn't actually have a formal contract with Oracle. They are arguing that the Hurd press release, which basically said "we are going to return to business as usual" after the Hurd scuffle, is a contract for future development on Itanium. Pretty weak.

      I don't think HP has any chance to win these lawsuits. Even if they manage to win in France, Oracle could just pull out of the country until France reconsiders and have their few major French customers acquire the software in another country. Not a big problem either way, but I don't think it will become a problem. Arguing that Itanium has a rosy future is a lost cause.

  5. Steve Mann

    Bah!

    This just in: drivers of cars with petrol engines to be sued by Perkins Engines Company Limited for predatory driving habits that restrict trade.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Food for thought...

    HP just paid $10.3 billion, less cash, for Autonomy (28.4x forward earnings). Oracle acquired Sun for $5 billion, less Sun's cash on hand. Oracle attempted to sell HP Sun's hardware assets (Oracle just wanted to control Java and MySQL) for an undisclosed price. You have to assume that Oracle would have been willing to part with Sun's legacy hardware business for a billion or two as it was deep in the red and Java was/is the profit center. If HP would have paid Oracle a small fraction of the cost of Autonomy, or about the cost of Palm which is now basically worthless, they could have retained their position as Oracle's preferred HW partner and might have been able to challenge IBM in the high end systems market. Instead, they decided to pass, allow their most important enterprise software partner to cut them out and then engage in this all out war which will probably result in Oracle doing everything in its considerable power not only to kill Itanium/HP-UX but also to make it as hard as possible to run their software on HP x86 and storage (e.g. no testing, no certifications, no ability to resell OEL/OVM).... Regardless of who you think is right in this lawsuit, it was an insane decision on HP's part.

    1. Matt Bryant Silver badge
      Boffin

      RE: Food for thought...

      The hp version I heard (over a beer, not an official briefing) was that the way Oracle wanted to cut the deal was Oracle got the software toys and hp would then take on the hardware and continue to make servers for Slowaris to run on, including some form of SPARC server. This was so as to guarantee Oracle a means to keep the existing Slowaris base until they could be ported to a long-term new server architecture, presumably Oracle Linux or Slowaris x86. Not surprisingly, hp's board weren't too keen on the idea of taking over the Niagara/CMT line nor coming to some form of agreement with Fudgeitso to badge SPARC64 servers, whilst Oracle got the "easy" and more lucrative software play. After all, hp was looking forward to eating that Slowaris base, not keeping a competitive platform in existance. If Larry had been happy to simply let the other Slowaris server architectures die and just support Oracle Linux and Slowaris on ProLiant then it probably would have been acceptable to the hp board.

      1. This post has been deleted by its author

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        RE: Food for thought... → #

        I agree with you. I am sure when Oracle came to HP and said "how about we take all of the profitable parts of Sun and you can have the legacy HW that is left over" it didn't sound like a great deal to HP. I think it was short sighted on HP's part. I am sure their thinking was that they don't need Sun to beat Sun. They were pretty successful at taking out Sun with x86 without the needing to acquire them. What they didn't consider, IMO, is that the decision was between acquiring Sun or letting Sun slowly die independently is a very different scenario than acquiring Sun or having Oracle acquire Sun. They should have realized that a combined Oracle-Sun was going to cost them much more in lost future revenue than the cost of acquiring Sun's hardware assets. HP could have acquired Sun's hardware assets and basically thrown them away for a billion or two. Even though the Sparc gear and storage isn't of much value from a technology perspective, from a strategic perspective it would have limited the high end system space to two vendors, given them a leg up in migrating the sizable legacy Sun install base to HP vs. IBM, and would have kept them in good standing with Oracle. Those three factors alone should have made it worthwhile from a strategic perspective, completely apart from any value in Sun's hardware assets. HP looked at it as, "Do we want the Sparc systems" (obviously not) when they should have looked at it as "do we want Oracle, our most important enterprise ISV, to become a competitor and use their cash to revitalize Sun." The amount Oracle has cost them in Itanium systems alone in the past year would have justified the acquisition. Not to mention all of the future cash that will be lost because of the total, scorch the earth war between HP and Oracle.

        It becomes really obvious that acquiring Sun's hardware assets would have been a good decision when you look at what they acquired instead around the same time frame (Autonomy, 3PAR, Palm). They could have gotten a much larger bang for their buck with Sun's hardware than any of the three above. They could have acquired Sun's hardware assets about 5 times for the cost of Autonomy (the remnants of Leo's failed strategy).

        1. Matt Bryant Silver badge
          Devil

          RE: RE: Food for thought...

          Hindsight is always 20-20. Who could have predicted the Hurd debacle, his jumping ship to Oracle, or Larry's subsequent meltdown? The real question should be were Mark and Larry already scheming away whilst Hurd was in the place in hp to make the decision to buy the Sun hardware?

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            RE: RE: Food for thought... → #

            True, it would have been hard to predict the Hurd situation, followed by Oracle picking up Hurd, followed by the Itanium support announcement, followed by all out war in the anti-trust courts. HP probably assumed it would shake out similarly to the relationship between Oracle and IBM. Not best of friends, but they have kind of come to a tolerance and acceptance of each other. Still, for a pretty small amount of cash for HP, they could have made it a two horse race in high end systems, been connected at the hip to Oracle (all of those Exa-xxx systems would have an HP logo on them), and set up a transition path for Sun's large legacy install base similar to the DEC install base (pumped out a generation or two of Sparc while rapidly transitioning Sun installs to HP... or HP Exa... a la Alpha systems). It should have been a pretty simple decision.... It is possible that Hurd and Larry set up this one-two punch while Hurd was at HP, but that would assume that Hurd knew he was going to get booted at HP.

            1. Matt Bryant Silver badge
              Happy

              RE: RE: RE: Food for thought...

              "....Still, for a pretty small amount of cash for HP, they could have made it a two horse race in high end systems...." Ah, but if you're going to play hindsight, you could ask how much easier life would have been for IBM if they'd just bought Microsoft back in 1980-81, when PC-DOS was first put on IBM PCs? Or even hp in 1986 when they first started on hp9000 systems? Or Oracle in 1978 when it first released the Oracle DB on PDP-11 - how much hassle would that have saved Big Blue?

              1. Anonymous Coward
                Anonymous Coward

                RE: Food for thought... → #

                The Microsoft situation was a gigantic mishandling. The acquisition of HP or Oracle would have been tricky as IBM was being watched for anti-trust and competitive issues by the regulators. They probably would have liked to have acquired those companies, particularly Oracle, but it would not have flown with the regulators. HP could have acquired Sun's hardware businesses without a bit of trouble from the regulators.

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        RE: Food for thought... → #

        That is the version of the story I have heard too. That HP was fine with Oracle taking Java and MySQL, as well as GlassFish, the IDEs and other software components, but Oracle wanted to retain the platform software (Solaris, ZFS, and the tools) to license while HP got stuck pumping out Sparc gear for an increasingly smaller user base. If Oracle would have agreed to give up Solaris and related software or if they would have agreed to let HP dump Sparc and port all of the Sun users to x86, they may have been able to come to an agreement. I still think HP should have just thrown some cash at Oracle to avoid a revitalized Sun and the war with Oracle. They underestimated how serious Oracle was about going to the mat with them over HW, which they shouldn't have as they are familiar with Oracle. The funny part is that Oracle ended up developing all of their new systems on x86 anyway and will probably drop Sparc in the next few years.

  7. Allison Park

    Bootnote

    Oracle is mean and HP is bitter and the real losers are customers.

    Time to start looking at other vendors for your hardware and software stack if you have not already

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Bootnote → #

      That seems to be the popular consensus.

    2. Matt Bryant Silver badge
      Happy

      RE: Bootnote

      The view from under the bridge?

  8. Phil 4
    WTF?

    RE: Bootnote @ Allison Park

    Spoken like a true IBMer. I'm sorry but Oracle is mean? HP is bitter? If anything HP's customers should be bitter! Do you recall TRU64, Alpha, PA-RISC? HP clearly knows about canceling architectures and forcing customers to migrate to new architectures. They’ve been doing it for over 10 years! Why do you think HP bought EDS? Because they realized that the big money is in selling services for migrations and they didn’t want all the migration revenue to go to IBM's IGS. 57% of IBM's revenue comes from selling services while less than 3% comes from selling Power servers. IBM's HW is just a trojan horse to sell and drive more services revenue.

    So, the writing has been on the wall for several years with Itaniums demise. 20+ HW vendors dropped developing Itanium systems, Redhat and Microsoft dropped OS support, and even HP dropped Linux support on Itanium so Oracle now dropping SW development is just the latest in long line of abandoning the sinking Itanic before it drowns. Now regarding Oracle, theres no proof whatsoever that Oracle is mean. After all, Oracle wants to continue being #1 with its key SW and it now has the HW vehicle to deliver its SW on a more cost competitive platform whether its x86 or SPARC and whether its Linux or Solaris. So while IBM wants to lock in those HP customers with AIX/Power, and HP is now trying to migrate Itanium customers to Linux on x86 with its Odyssey project, Oracle is offering choice. So all this bull about Oracle being mean is just pure FUD. And Hurd has realized that Oracle is where its at.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      WTF?

      Spoken like a true Oracle employee (Oracler?). While I don't think there is any disagreement about HP being the grand master of dropping platforms and Itanium's future, Oracle is about offering choice?

      In what world is Power/AIX more of a lock in than Oracle's new engineered systems (Exa-xxx)? Power/AIX is a Unix platform. You can run basically any DB, with the exception of MS SQL (because MS doesn't support Power or anything other than x86, IBM would welcome them), any application server and any application set in the world. Oracle Exa-xxx is Oracle or Oracle software. No other ISVs need apply. Exa-xxx is the most proprietary, locked-in system on the planet. What other hardware system offers you zero other ISV choices for any portion of the system? As compared to Oracle Exa-xxx, IBM mainframe is a wide open system.

      Oracle's marketing says they are about creating open systems (OpenWorld, after all), but that is misleading. They mean they are using Oracle proprietary instantiations of open technologies, Java primarily. I was at an Oracle Fusion conference and the Oracle VP was going on about Fusion being open, offering choice, best of breed, etc, etc. I asked the question: Being that Oracle is committed to open standards and choice, I assume you will offer Fusion ERP customers the choice of running WebSphere as the application server as it is J2EE using Oracle's JDK... how about DB2 as it is based on SQL and uses Oracle's PL/SQL procedural scripting.... They are going to get back to me on that question. No other ERP provider in the world offers customers zero choices from ERP to application server to DB, coming soon to platform. Compare Oracle ERP's openness and choice with SAP.

      While services is an important part of IBM's business, saying that services = 57% and Power = 3% is misleading (if 3% is correct, it seems low). When IBM sells a Power server, the initial hardware purchase is counted as systems/Power revenue, the contract to support and maintain the Power system falls into IGS, likewise with the software support. If you include all of the services which are directly attached to the Power server and the software utilities on the Power servers, it is much greater a percentage of revenue.

      Remember, most of the customers using HP-UX and Oracle are using HP-UX because Oracle told them at the time of implementation that HP was their preferred platform (basically anything other than IBM was their preferred platform). If these customers had gone against the grain and implemented a platform against Oracle's advice, they would probably be less upset. In most cases the software leads the hardware and these customers asked Oracle point-blank "which platform should we use for your software?", HP was generally the answer as they did not compete with Oracle at all and Dell sucks. Customers are upset because Oracle is clearly blowing up HP because they own Sun.

  9. Phil 4
    WTF?

    @ Wunderbar1

    "Spoken like a true Oracle employee (Oracler?). While I don't think there is any disagreement about HP being the grand master of dropping platforms and Itanium's future, Oracle is about offering choice?"

    Well, if you look at each layer of the Oracle stack, yes, theres choice. Oracle offers several DB's, several virtualization technologies, OSes (Oracle Linux, Solaris), choice of CPU architectures (x86/SPARC), Storage, etc and many of these are open standards.

    "In what world is Power/AIX more of a lock in than Oracle's new engineered systems (Exa-xxx)? Power/AIX is a Unix platform."

    If you choose AIX, you are locked to Power, if you choose Power, you are locked to AIX. Either way, you are locked to IBM as you can't run AIX on other vendors hardware and no one but IBM sells Power servers. With Oracle Linux and Solaris, you can choose HP, IBM, Dell hardware. With SPARC, which is an IEEE open standard, you can choose Oracle or Fujitsu. Exadata runs standard x86 best of breed servers. Nothing proprietary here.

    Choosing Exa-xx means that you've already chosen/are running Oracle DB 11G and/or Weblogic and you want to run your datawarehouse/ OLTP or middleware as fast as possible. Exa-xxx runs either Oracle Linux or Solaris. Wheres the lock-in? Its an appliance. You buy it to run what you already have faster. If you buy Exadata today, you can always move your data to a new system in the future which can be on another vendors hardware-since both supported OSes run on 3rd party HW. There is no Exa proprietary format. its Oracle DB running on clustered x86 systems.

    "You can run basically any DB, with the exception of MS SQL (because MS doesn't support Power or anything other than x86, IBM would welcome them), any application server and any application set in the world. Oracle Exa-xxx is Oracle or Oracle software. No other ISVs need apply. "

    The whole idea of Oracle on Oracle is optimization, integration and reduced risk and costs for the millions of customers running Oracle SW. Why complicate your datacenter mixing hundreds of vendors across the stack? Oracle SW is #1 across a wide range of its SW offerings and now Oracle is selling HW to run its SW fastest.

    Which other ISVs need apply? SAP is certified on Exadata, as is the Oracle SW stack its optimized for?

    "Exa-xxx is the most proprietary, locked-in system on the planet. "

    Spoken like a true IBM-er. Oracle doesn’t force customers to choose Exa-xx for running Oracle DB. You can choose one of Oracles x86-series or SPARC series servers or dare I say, run IBM Power servers. Customers know up front if Exa-xxx will work for them or not and clearly a 1,000 plus customers can't be wrong. http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/422468

    "What other hardware system offers you zero other ISV choices for any portion of the system?"

    What other ISV choices are necessary? Exadata is an Oracle DB datawarehouse/OLTP engineered system. Its designed to run Oracle DB. You won't buy Exadata to run DB2 or Sybase will you? If you need to run other ISV software, you can now choose SPARC SuperCluster or Oracles standard x86 or SPARC servers. The support over 11,000 different applications from over 400 different ISV's. Need more choice? Its not possible on IBM nor HP.

    "As compared to Oracle Exa-xxx, IBM mainframe is a wide open system" Yeah and Ive seen pigs fly.

    "Oracle's marketing says they are about creating open systems (OpenWorld, after all), but that is misleading. They mean they are using Oracle proprietary instantiations of open technologies, Java primarily. I was at an Oracle Fusion conference and the Oracle VP was going on about Fusion being open, offering choice, best of breed, etc, etc. I asked the question: Being that Oracle is committed to open standards and choice, I assume you will offer Fusion ERP customers the choice of running WebSphere as the application server as it is J2EE using Oracle's JDK... how about DB2 as it is based on SQL and uses Oracle's PL/SQL procedural scripting.... They are going to get back to me on that question. No other ERP provider in the world offers customers zero choices from ERP to application server to DB, coming soon to platform. Compare Oracle ERP's openness and choice with SAP."

    Oracle claiming its an open systems vendor is no mor misleading than HP or IBM claiming the same.

    "While services is an important part of IBM's business, saying that services = 57% and Power = 3% is misleading (if 3% is correct, it seems low)."

    Services is not just an "important" part of IBM's business, it’s the key focus for the company and everything else IBM does is to help drive more services. Otherwise it would be selling direct, fully comparable systems to Oracles Engineered systems. Problem for IBM, is that they won't be able to sell any services as its not needed with Oracle Engineered systems.

    The %'s are taken directly from IBM's quarterly financial statement located here: http://www.ibm.com/investor/3q11/presentation/3q11.pdf

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Thumb Down

      @ Wunderbar1 → #

      "Well, if you look at each layer of the Oracle stack, yes, theres choice. Oracle offers several DB's, several virtualization technologies, OSes (Oracle Linux, Solaris), choice of CPU architectures (x86/SPARC), Storage, etc and many of these are open standards."

      - Are you serious? Notice the pattern. All of these are Oracle products. Also, if you look at the flagship systems (Exa-xxx), there are basically no choices... Solaris or Oracle ripped off Red Hat, that's it.

      "If you choose AIX, you are locked to Power, if you choose Power, you are locked to AIX. Either way, you are locked to IBM as you can't run AIX on other vendors hardware and no one but IBM sells Power servers. With Oracle Linux and Solaris, you can choose HP, IBM, Dell hardware. With SPARC, which is an IEEE open standard, you can choose Oracle or Fujitsu. Exadata runs standard x86 best of breed servers. Nothing proprietary here."

      - Actually, if you choose Power, you are not locked into AIX. You can run AIX, i OS, or Linux.

      - You cannot run Solaris on HP, IBM or Dell hardware anymore. Oracle killed support because they are mean. - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/18/oracle_spikes_hp_solaris/

      - Oracle just quietly ended SPARC64 from Fujitsu in the M Series. Sparc's legacy as an open standard is in spite of Oracle, not because of Oracle.

      - "Exadata runs standard x86 best of breed servers." Yes, that is because Sparc is a joke and x86 is the only option. On Exadata, you have one choice of chip, two choices of OS (both Oracle), one choice for DB, one choice for utilities. All proprietary, all Oracle, all non-negotiable.

      "'As compared to Oracle Exa-xxx, IBM mainframe is a wide open system' Yeah and Ive seen pigs fly."

      - You can run Oracle's DB on IBM mainframe. Can you run IBM's DB on Oracle Exadata?

      "Spoken like a true IBM-er. Oracle doesn’t force customers to choose Exa-xx for running Oracle DB. You can choose one of Oracles x86-series or SPARC series servers or dare I say, run IBM Power servers. Customers know up front if Exa-xxx will work for them or not and clearly a 1,000 plus customers can't be wrong. http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/422468"

      - The options are getting narrower all the time. IBM DB2 is supported on many more platforms than Oracle, most notably their rival HP-UX's OS which Oracle just killed. Oracle originally pitched itself and grew as platform agnostic, now that they have Sun they are closing in on customers.

      - 1,000 customers is nothing as compared to the size of Oracle's install base. Also, how many of those customers paid anything near full price for Exa-xxx as opposed to having it thrown in with a license true-up? Oracle never says that they "sold" 1,000 Exadatas. They have "shipped" 1,000 Exadatas which includes give aways to major customers and PoCs. Also, an Exadata can be a small as a half-rack. Where are the 100 TB plus Exadata installs? All of their references have small installs.

      "Oracle claiming its an open systems vendor is no mor misleading than HP or IBM claiming the same."

      - IBM supports everything on their platforms. IBM software runs on every platform, even those they dislike such as HP-UX.

      "Services is not just an "important" part of IBM's business, it’s the key focus for the company and everything else IBM does is to help drive more services. Otherwise it would be selling direct, fully comparable systems to Oracles Engineered systems. Problem for IBM, is that they won't be able to sell any services as its not needed with Oracle Engineered systems."

      - I said services are important, but it is not the only focus and certainly not the focus of Systems Group. If services are the key focus, why have the last 20 plus acquisitions been all software and hardware. Also, if you look at IBM's services revenue, the majority is total outsourcing/managed services contracts, management consulting, and business process services. Integrating platform and DB represents next to nothing for IBM Global Services, the VARs perform that work. Companies like Oracle were built based upon horizontal integration. Oracle partnered with everyone to compete with IBM and now they are throwing all of their partners under the bus because they picked up a dead hardware company on the cheap.

  10. Allison Park

    Oracle is the pot calling the kettle black

    Oracle kills off Itanium support while there are two more chips in the design process.

    Oracle kills off SPARC64 (no more chips in the future) and refuse to admit it until a software VP slips up and says that they won't be using the fujitsu chips any more.

    1. Phil 4
      Mushroom

      @ Allison Park -Oracle is the pot calling the kettle black

      Allison, you need to work on your fact finding skills. Oracle didn’t kill off Itanium support, it killed future software developments. Oracle will continue to support current SW on Itanium for next 8+ years. Besides, Oracle just followed the trend of abandoning the Itanic before it sinks just like Redhat, Microsoft and the other 15+ HW vendors that used to sell Itanium including Dell and IBM.

      Oracles is still selling SPARC64VII+ systems that were announced last year with a healthy 5-7 year lifecycle. And if you look at the public roadmaps, SPARC M-Series continues for next several generations.

      As for SPARC64, its clearly thriving as its now #1 on Top500 Supercomputers. http://i.top500.org/system/177232

      HPC market, however, just doesn’t apply well to Oracles commercial software world so clearly, directions change.

      If you haven't been locked in a box this past year, you'll see that Oracle is delivering on time to its public SPARC roadmap on systems which is fully backed and supported by Fujitsu. No changes there. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/09/oracle_fujitsu_sparc_collaboration/

      As SPARC is an IEEE standard and Oracle continues to legally guarantee binary compatibility going forward, whatever the future SPARC CPU becomes, current Solaris software will just work. Something that can't be said for all those poor Itanium customers that will eventually be forced to x86 by HP with its Odyssey project.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    Re: pot calling the kettle black #

    Yes, and Oracle was perfectly happy to go along with HP Itanium right up until 2011 when the entire world had been making Itanic jokes and major providers had been pulling support for years. It was great for Oracle. They didn't care about hardware and it kept customers away from IBM's competiting software products. After they acquired Sun, and provided enough time to make it less obvious that they were pulling HP support purely as a competitive move, they suddenly stumble across this revelation that Intel is focused on x86 (what!) and Itanium's future is not rosy (since before it was released).

    Yes, it was a quiet death for the M Series. I think Oracle seriously believed that because the external box looked the same and both chips started with Sparc they could just slide it past customers that it is an entirely different chip set.

    1. Phil 4
      WTF?

      @ Wunderbar1 re: pot calling the kettle black

      You all know Larry doesn’t play unless he is #1.. Oracle DB is close to 50% marketshare with the next 3 vendors added together not even coming close. Now that Oracle has Sun, they no longer need to depend on HP, nor IBM to grow its business.

      Quiet death for M-Series? Are you kidding? Its still a critical business for Oracle and if you looked at the public roadmap on SPARC, will see that Oracle has plans to continue M-Series developments well into the future. I have more faith in Oracle delivering on its roadmaps than the Itanium roadmap!

      1. Matt Bryant Silver badge
        FAIL

        RE: @ Wunderbar1 re: pot calling the kettle black

        Wow, Phil 4, but which planet did you fly in from?

        ".....Oracle DB is close to 50% marketshare with the next 3 vendors added together not even coming close...." Laughable! Oracle has been gradually losing share for years, with M$ gradually eating it away. Oracle may still be number one, but IDC don't put the figure as anything near 50% (try 31%), and say that M$ SQL Server not only overtook DB2 in 2008-9, it is also the only major DB to be growing marketshare. Predictions are that M$ SQL Server will overtake Oracle DB inside of ten years at the current rate, especially as SQL Server is growing on the back of the growth of Windows, whilst Oracle is suffering the decline of UNIX. Oh, and BTW, hp is the leading x86 vendor shifting all those Windows servers that are eating holes in the Snoreacle share.

        ".....Now that Oracle has Sun, they no longer need to depend on HP, nor IBM to grow its business...." Boy, I did laugh at that one! Have you seen the tiny marketshare figures for Snoreacle servers? Snoreacle is COMPLETELY dependent on hp, IBM and Dell.

        ".....I have more faith in Oracle delivering on its roadmaps than the Itanium roadmap!" Spoken like a true Sunshiner. It's just like the good old days of McNealy worship all over again - tell me, when are we going to see those Nova systems and the Rock CPU?

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: You all know Larry doesn’t play unless he is #1.

        Larry is only number one in one business, DBMS. He is a distant second to SAP in ERP. If you consider PS, JDE, EBS, Fusion as separate products, SAP is in another league. He is number two in middleware, behind IBM. He is tied second in Unix servers, a mile behind IBM and tied with Itanic. He doesn't even factor into the top 5 in storage. He doesn't come close to Red Hat in Linux. Really, it is just DB in which they are clearly number one. Everything else is an extension of DB and not all that successful. You are right about Oracle DB being at 50% (48%) of the DB market. IBM has 20-25% with DB2 depending on who you listen to about market share. MS SQL is around 15%. The rest are nominal. The problem for Oracle is that they grew on the "we are not old school IBM" (we don't want to own the stack) value proposition. Now they have done a 180 on their customers. The customers don't like it.

        Oh, there will definitely be M Series in the future. Oracle Sparc, not Fujitsu Sparc, version of the M Series. The Sparc business in general is a joke for Oracle. The unwanted step child of the Sun acquisition. They will go another few rounds as they try to migrate Sparc customers to Exa-xxx and then kill Sparc. It just doesn't have the volumes to succeed.

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        ok put a M in front of a future T-system and say the m-class how future systems. Thats like HP saying superdome has a life because they will put xeon chips in it and Itanium will not have Poulson or Kittson. SPARC64 is dead as dead and Oracle is being a hypocrite.

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