back to article Win Sun, lose Sun: How Larry's bet on old-world systems hurt Oracle

Feeling calm and relaxed? Join the Reg on a journey to an alternate reality where Oracle’s cloud business is the envy of all of its competitors. It holds two trillion objects and is growing faster now than at any time in its history. What began as something for developers is becoming an enterprise IT staple – a platform for …

  1. joeldillon

    'Running SPARC on Intel or Unix'....err, what?!

    1. fifemacman

      You beat me to it

    2. Billl
      Windows

      re: "SPARC on Intel or Unix"

      This was when I started to realize this author has limited knowledge of this industry -- at least the enterprise market. AWS is great for startup Internet based companies, and midsize companies needing a bit of a scaling boost, but in general enterprise companies will not trust AWS. Can you image running your companies month end, quarter end, or especially their year end books on AWS? I see possibly some smaller, midsize companies doing this on Azure, but definitely not on AWS. Oracle will be big in moving the traditional enterprise customer to the Cloud -- this is just now starting and Oracle appears to have a pretty good chunk of this market. The big guys pay their bills and are willing to pay more money than the typical AWS customer.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Is this article an Amazon marketing AD or what?

    If Amazon is the Cloud juggernaut you so highly praise (are you funded by Amazon?), why does Amazon hide its cloud based revenue in its "other" category as you claim?

    Does it not want people to figure out what its true "Cloud" revenue really is or be able to track it like most Cloud providers do? What about the reporting of R&D expenses and operations expenses needed to maintain AWS?

    And really, what is "cloud" anyway? Isn't it just hardware and software running in a datacenter somewhere/everywhere that’s accessible by anyone over the Internet for a fee to run their business? So in the end, it will come down to who's hardware and software provides the best business value to its customers? Surely price isn't the only determining factor.

    And if what many are calling the "The Race To Zero", will Amazon be leading the pack? Reminds me of this famous quote "Pioneers get the arrows, settlers get the land"

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Is this article an Amazon marketing AD or what?

      "If Amazon is the Cloud juggernaut"

      Azure is about to pass AWS in terms of revenue. And is already profitable, unlike AWS...

      Oracle? IBM? I didn't even know they had cloud offerings!

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Is this article an Amazon marketing AD or what?

      "Does it not want people to figure out what its true "Cloud" revenue really is or be able to track it like most Cloud providers do?"

      Speaking as somebody who has managed teams to analyse and track listed companies by their newsflow and public disclosures, I can assure you that the OP is correct. Most large US tech corporation go out of their way to obfuscate their divisional business performance right up the absolute limits required by SEC segmental reporting requirements.

      Anybody who thinks that they can really get useful information from a 10-k usually doesn't understand much about the underlying operations, nor the range of information that you'd need to meaningfully analyse the specific operations. And that is both because the officers and directors wish to be able to hide bad news from shareholders, and because they don't wish to give away information to competitors.

  3. DainB Bronze badge

    "Oracle cloud business could still haul past AWS, but it has handicapped and set itself back in getting there."

    Where AWS is failing miserably is in selling to enterprises, those weird companies that do not buy IT services from online book store.

    Where Oracle is shining is in selling to enterprises, those weird companies that still prefer buy all IT from one supplier.

    Put 1 and 1 together and you have a nice business model. That was easy, eh ?

    1. Naselus

      "Where AWS is failing miserably is in selling to enterprises"

      Or in, y'know, actually making a profit ever...

      Is anyone actually sure what the point of AWS is yet? The other clouds all seem to have business models, while AWS appears to mostly be set up to break other people's regardless of how much cash it pisses into the wind. It really just appears to be an attempt to destroy the cloud marketplace for everyone else.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "Shaking that AaaS"

    are they working on Copper-based ICs?

    [anyone seen my coat?]

  5. SunBoy

    Oracle *ROYALY* screwed Sun and its customer base

    When Oracle took over - "we" were the 51st? (ish) takeover it had done - THEY DID NOT CARE....

    Oracle noddys came in and said this is how we do a takeover - we monitize everything and stop actually providing customer service - unless you pay through the nose - and even then we wont do what Sun once did for you....because its not the Oracle way...

    Hence - we now see customers - who had already been spooked by the hawking around McNealy had been doing of Sun and the lacklustre hardware (and cheapened too - ever seen what a 2006 V240 looks like with the flimsy plastic overs that look like they have been manufactured by a cheap toy company?)

    Oracle ALIENATED the ENTIRE customer base and massively miffed everybody off.....(then had the cheek to close down Sun GMP - move everyone to TVP and turn GMP into a filmset for Cuban Fury).

    Im not saying what Sun did and was doing was right - there were too many bean counters and middle management and really STUPID projects doing dumb things that wasted more money on the pretence of saving it.....BUT - Oracle missed an opportunity - sure - make money out of Sun - they got rid of all the talented staff, toned down customer service and what ever they could make the customer do themselves followed by hiking up all the service fees (i.e. double the amount for less service) and focused entirely on hardware to suit the Oracle database and nothing about what their customerbase was actually doing.

    This then means the majority of my now customers (HUGE finance sector clients) have major projects to move from Sun hardware and Solaris to Linux - often on HP.

    1. DainB Bronze badge

      Re: Oracle *ROYALY* screwed Sun and its customer base

      There were no Sun SPARC hardware anyone wanted to buy in 2010, full stop.

      CoolThreads was an utter junk no one wanted and M-series was shipped straight from Fujitsu factories. The Rock never materialized. 4 years later both T and M series manufactured by Oracle and among the best and fastest CPUs on market.

      So Sun royally screwed itself and their customers being unable to offer them anything.

      1. SunBoy

        Re: Oracle *ROYALY* screwed Sun and its customer base

        As I noted with the V240 comment.....Sun didnt quite go for the quality factor as much as it used to....and hey, getting Fujitsu to make things meant that the Sun factories didnt have to bring back everyone they had just RIF`d ....

        But - instead of actually doing anything useful with the staff and new customers when Oracle bought Sun, they did the exact opposite....

        Sure, the T and M series systems are the best Sun hardware systems for a number of years - but the Oracle way of doing things screwed their potential....

        Instead of being a box that folks are jumping to to keep their applications alive whilst they work an exit plan to linux......they could have been keeping the customers happy and actually keeping the Sparc/Solaris platform fully alive......

        "We are the dot in dot com" - was a slogan once at Sun - why ? because the DNS machine that ran the .com resolver was a Sun/Sparc/Solaris system - one would wonder why it is no more!

  6. foxyshadis

    Was this article paid by the world?

    Reminded me of my high school physics teach: "I'll tell you what I'm going to tell you, I'll tell you, then I'll tell you what I told you."

    1. Alan Mackenzie

      Re: Was this article paid by the world?

      .... By the word, perhaps? Even the Reg doesn't have such pretensions.

  7. PeterM42
    Thumb Down

    I always hated .......

    ......getting involved with Oracle software.

    What was the difference between v10.1.5.84.258.1254.12.15.27

    and v10.1.5.84.259.7891.4876.2476.3647?

    Which is the version I should be using?

    What apps will it screw up?

    Ans: use the CD with the BLUE label (or was it the RED label?) and make sure you select the right options during install or NOTHING will work - AAAAAGGGHHHHH!!!

  8. boatsman
    Coat

    Amazon makes NO profit.

    that's it and that's that. lots of sales, no profit.

    no cigar for this story.

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