Re: virtualisation in their licensing
Sparc is only getting investment from people who need to update legacy stacks and CBA to migrate to Windows or Linux. Its not strategic or cost effective as far as any other technology leaders I talk to are concerned; it's a solution of last resort. The same as their database stack - See:
Information Technology Intelligence Consulting's October 2011 survey of more than 450 respondents found that Oracle products received the lowest ratings for quality of service and support of any of the major vendors. Half -- 50 percent of ITIC survey participants -- said that Oracle hardware reliability had worsened over the last two years, and 18 percent of Oracle customers gave the company "poor" and "unsatisfactory" ratings for technical service, support, and product warranties on server hardware.
Only 1 percent said Oracle support had "improved significantly." Only 32 percent of respondents gave Oracle an "excellent" or "very good" rating for product performance, service and support. This is in sharp contrast to the 85 percent of survey participants who gave rivals IBM (85 percent), HP (76 percent) and Dell (70 percent) "excellent" and "very good" marks for their hardware product performance, service and support.
In Oracle's core competency, databases, Microsoft's SQL Server scored significantly higher satisfaction ratings among survey respondents. More than 80 percent of participants gave Microsoft SQL Server "excellent" or "very good" ratings, compared to the 43 percent that gave the Oracle DB an "excellent" or "very good" rating.
And
Computer Economics surveyed 109 users in late 2010 for its "Go-Forward Strategies for Oracle Application Customers." The results indicate 42 percent of respondents were unhappy with the quality of Oracle support, while a 58 percent majority were dissatisfied with the cost of Oracle support.
"Our Sun support has become even more abysmal since crazy Larry purchased them -- hard to believe," said a network administrator at a large healthcare organization with 250 servers.
An IT Manager at a midsized manufacturing firm was equally distressed by Oracle's moves since acquiring Sun: "Since Oracle bought-out Sun, the future of Solaris is extremely dim if not already gone. IT departments that have invested heavily in SPARC/Solaris servers are going to have significant issues once it is no longer supported. Inevitably, this will lead to server reliability issues as the deprecated Sun hardware ages," the IT manager said.
Many organizations, including his own, had "dropped a small fortune to be able to run Solaris on its native RISC platform," he added -- and in so doing, they expected continuing enhancements and improvements to the product line. "So much for that," the IT manager said. "Companies will have a very difficult time being able to part with these premium-priced boat anchors when the time comes, and it will be sooner than later."
Many of the ITIC survey respondents said they were already moving from the Oracle SPARC and Solaris platforms.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
