Posts by Billl 165 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jul 2009
but to respond to a much smaller competitor in Cloud, as Oracle is, tips your hand that you may actually see real competition.
We'll see how it goes long term, but Oracle has more experience in the Enterprise Market and AWS has more experience in the consumer market -- with some notable exceptions for both. My guess is that they'll both do well in different markets with lots of overlaps.
The state of Oregon is incompetent. Oregon's issues were politically motivated/caused from the start. Oracle loses nothing in this settlement and the state gets to pay millions to Oracle in support costs. All of those products require Oracle DB and other services. Oracle has won big time here, but the politicians get to crow that they won. Oregon tax payers lose!
"The cloud providers can do the same by just scaling out white box x86 and throwing some Flash cards in the servers."
Fairly naive nonsense. If that were true then someone would have done it by now. No one has done it.
Sure, for OLTP, you can get pretty close, but without the reliability/availability required by large customers. As far as DWH's, noone even comes close to the performance of Exadata, at the scale that Exadata provides you. Sure, on smaller environments, less than a few TB of data, you can get close, but that's not much of a DWH these days.
Oracle sells to large enterprises that need performance and scale. I think Oracle will do very well with this service, as no one else can do what they do at this time. No, not MySQL, nor Postgres, nor Hana, nor...
Sun lost the volume server war. Sun was spending so much time and effort on low margin customers, that they ended up getting bought out by Oracle. If they would have been more consistent with Solaris on X86, then it might be Solaris now that owns the X86 Server Market -- instead of Linux.
Oracle is not a low margin vendor. Whether you like them or not, they want to sell a product with high margins. This has resulted in Oracle doing more with SPARC than Sun was doing the last few years. Whether you like/trust Oracle or not, you have to admit they are doing interesting things with SPARC right now. They're even talking about reentering the low end market with Sonoma.
Larry's a very patient guy. I hope he sticks with what he's doing on SPARC.
"If the cloud offerings were really taking off the declines would have been completely offset by gains in the cloud."
I'll let you off on this misconception, as finance rules are not generally very well understood. When you sell a piece of hardware, you get $$$. When you sell software, you get $$$. When you sell a service, you get a bit this year, then a bit next year, and then a bit the following year. Cloud is a service. You may sell $10M in Cloud, but it may be spread out over 5 years, meaning you get $2M this year, $2M the next, and so on.
Cloud is very expensive to get going, for the vendor, but once it's going you have a very consistent revenue stream.
Kind of a biased statement. Which other vendor sold 10,000 "Engineered Systems" in that time? According to the IDC's of the world, Oracle sells more Integrated/Engineered systems than all other vendors put together.
Also, the headline is garbage. Donatelli does not run the hardware unit. He runs the converged infrastructure business. Very different things.
Ha! "Copying everything from HP..."
On a constant currency basis Oracle is growing -- in Hardware too! HP is shrinking on constant currency basis, and in general.
You may be able to question some of Oracle's specific tactics, but you can't honestly claim that Oracle is copying HP in any way, shape, or form. Oracle has pretty much claimed victory over HP, and has IBM firmly in their cross hairs. All of this by changing how business is done, not by copying what others do -- again, you may question how they do this, but it seems to be working. While HP and IBM are divesting or just plain EOLing any original technology (PA-RISC, POWER, AIX, HP-UX, VMS, etc), Oracle is doubling down on Solaris, SPARC, OracleDB, etc).
HP is just a sad mess. IBM is fast becoming just services company, much as EDS was before HP bought it. Oracle is going the opposite direction by trying to become the Apple of Enterprise Computing. Again, you can argue whether Oracle will succeed, but it seems clear that this is their goal.
Naive much? In the United States Education is "owned" by the states, not the Federal Gov. Ever since the Feds got into the education business, diversity has suffered (I mean diversity of thought, not necessarily skin color). The money that Obama is "giving" is not budgeted for, and is being stolen from future generations. The fact that the government thinks they are spending their own money, and not their employers money (tax payers) is why the US is in such debt.
Before you drone on about military, roads, etc... Of course the Feds should collect taxes on a limited scale, for such activities as defense (which includes immigration), interstate commerce (which includes roads), and those things explicitly outlined in the US Constitution.
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.
Even as HP struggles, Matt the Troll continues to shill away. Sun has not existed as an entity for over 5 years now... Get over it!
If you're not aware, Larry likes to make money, and reselling others wares means less money in Oracle's coffers. Selling 10 of your own tech at a 30% margins makes you more money than selling 15 of someone else's tech at 10% margins -- simple math really.
I seem to remember Matt the Troll espousing how HP owned the high-end and nothing else mattered in the Enterprise Market. As HP's High End dwindles, it's funny to see Matt the Troll still going on and on.
IBM is just following Sun/Oracle's lead here. I leave out HP in this discussion as they've given up on the Chip innovation front, entirely relying on partners... Chips are not profitable, except for those that can monetize slave labor or those that own 90% of their market -- often both.
There is definitely value to be had by creating customized chips for your particular need, but the general CPU market is dead except for a very few.
IBM has been ahead of the curve in many cases by getting rid of profitable product groups before they fell off the cliff (PC's, Switches, Disks, etc), but they missed the boat on this one by about 10 years.
Warning... the above opinions are those of their author, and not necessarily based upon fact, nor any special knowledge of the company in question. Numbers may be over or under inflated, and are used relatively arbitrarily.
Nice generic terms here. Please provide specific examples, or we must assume that you are making up your experience.
I have not seen a Customer Satisfaction Survey for Oracle's Integrated Systems, but the fact that this segment is growing, and Oracle is growing faster than everyone else (except HP, as they started at a miniscule base point), tells me that their products work, and work well.
Your input is really rather dubious on it's face.
"They cannot buy the fixed board to fit, so they get hold of the design and make their own copies to fit to their customers' washing machines. "
Not quite. In this case it would be more like they "broke into the washing machine companies warehouse, stole the parts, and then put them in their customers machines."
They did not make their own copies of the fixes, they were accused of downloading the fixes and then providing them to their customers.
If I was repairing Maytag Washing Machines and claiming that I was an authorized service rep, then yes that would be comparable. Or if I were going to Maytags warehouse, stealing their parts, then claiming that I used only Maytag OEM Parts, then yes that would be comparable.
Terix is accused of stealing Oracle Patches, technotes, etc, and passing them off to their customers.
Oracle puts the time and money into creating technical notes, creating patches, etc, and Terix is getting paid for them. Whether you see value in these things or not (Terix and their customers did), it is not honest business practices.
As Terix stated themselves -- to paraphrase "..that would be dishonest."
"It's perfectly comparable. "
I disagree. Oracle does not just resell RedHat and call it their own, or state that they are a RedHat Authorized Service Partner. Oracle takes CentOS, repackages it and sells it under the name of OEL. If Terix had taken OpenSolaris and repackaged it under the name of TerixOS, then there would be similarity, and your arguments would have merit.
I know there is a lot of Oracle hatred here, but let's be open/fair minded about it.
The reason it's broken is because of the draconian government rules now. Health insurers cannot compete across State borders, for one! The Feds will make the health care system worse for everyone, instead of great for most. The system was broken, but this is not the fix!
Actual free markets is the answer, not more government control. The incompetent website is not what's wrong with Obamacare. Governments are inherently incompetent. Free, regulated, markets are the answer. When I say, regulated, I don't mean making more rules so that the Pols get more money/control, but so that Free Markets are actually protected (protect us from monopolies and unfair competitive practices).
The middle class is once again being told to give to the poor, at gun point. Don't believe it? Try not paying your taxes, see what happens.
" let your aggressive tendencies go."
"Now where the moronity and lack of enterprise experience is? Seems to me that your reaction is just a defensive reflex?"
I think you mistake me for someone else. I never questioned your experience, just your conclusions. You can discern my comments based upon my handle. I have not been anonymous here, so it shouldn't be too difficult.
From your most recent comments I can only conclude that your point is that existing performance problems are generally not SW/HW related, but poorly tuned queries; Therefore, you seem to imply that many companies will pay huge sums of money for a product like this when they could have just paid someone like you to tune their environment (likely saving millions). I agree with that conclusion, if that is indeed what you are saying.
My problem with your comments is that I am aware of many many situations where existing environments are just hitting the wall on what they can do. They've tuned the crap out of it. They have so many indexes that they just can't possibly keep up with them all. Sure there are lazy DBA's that will just take their poor admin tendencies and move them over to faster HW/SW and call it good. So? That's been going on since the beginning of computing, and will likely continue. So I must ask, now that I think I get your point, why make the point in the first place?
I think the point is that you don't seem to see the need for 100-1000x speedup. That seems very naive for someone that has been in the industry as long as you state. I've seen queries take longer than 48hrs. I've seen queries that take 2 hours, that are unusable because the data that made it up is out of date already. If you could make that 2 hour query take only 2 minutes, then just imagine all of the decisions you could make that previously you were unable to substantiate?
The point is that this tech could provide for new uses of existing data that you have not thought of before. Currently you may limit your data size, or query, to accommodate a faster response. With this technology you may not have to do that. Currently, to enable decision support you may have to cache your data in an Exalytics (TimesTen) or squeeze your data into a HANA, but with this technology, you may not have to.
If you work in this industry, try not to limit yourself by what you currently do. New tech implies new opportunities.
None of this is for more than 10 years. The point was to find out what tech IBM and SAP have been doing for more than 10 years. SoldDB, as you state was released in 2003, and Sybase started in 2006. At least implies... well, at least 10 years. You've demonstrated only "at most".
If selecting "device:memory" is the same as in-memory, then why does SAP have a completely different product in HANA? You are duplicitous in your comments. Oracle must have two separate products, but it's okay for SAP to have two separate products? or is that not what you meant?
Also, to say that TimesTen is not "truly" in-memory seems like a dodge to me. Many smarter people than me, and I guess you, seem to think TimesTen is a "true" in-memory DB (actually, they say it is hybrid, but so are all of the options you mention).
I would be careful of IBM's use of the term "deployments". That term seems to leave out the fact that many/most are not in production, and many/most are not even paid for. I'm not saying that's what IBM is doing here, but... So, seeing how TimesTen has been around so much longer, and it has better integration with the most popular Database in the world, I think I'll stick with TimesTen/Exalytics.
To claim that Oracle is late to the game on in-memory is nonsense. Oracle has had TimesTen since 2005. TimesTen has been around (on it's own) since 1996. It was actually created by HP. How long has Hana been around? Oh, there it is... 2010!!!
Which IBM and Sybase-SAP in-memory tech has been around for at least 10 years?
Hana has been around since 2010, that's only 3 years. IBM didn't put in-memory into DB2 until 2013, so you can't claim they've had it longer either. As far as I know, if you want in-memory from SAP you can't use Sybase, you have to use an unproven Hana technology. IBM's in-memory tech "solidDB" was released in 2008, so you can't mean that...
Your comment is obviously ill conceived. Can you please clarify your comment?
Funny. HP's HW sales are declining much faster than Oracles. As a matter of fact Oracle expects to possibly grow HW sales next quarter, while HP expects to continue to bleed profusely for the forseeable future. Is HP killing HW? No, of course not. Oracle is starting to turn around their HW house. SPARC is the most performant CPU on the market, and the only thing that Oracles competitors can say is "It's not all about performance". Boy, how the times, they are a changin'.
I know you didn't mention HP Matt, but you have to know that you have HP tatoo'd on your forehead.
"Wii U CPU - Tri-Core IBM PowerPC "Espresso""
Thanks for that. I was not aware of what chip Nintendo was using. Well, Nintendo has never seemed to care as much about pure performance in the past, so if they got a good deal from IBM, I guess it makes sense. Sony and Microsoft went the obvious route, both abandoning Power.
I still don't see this relatively small (money-wise) portion of the market helping IBM. IBM is pushing hard to get others to use or even copy their chips. I think it is more to expand the use of Power versus trying to make money directly. Oracle (Sun) has been doing that for years with varying levels of success. Fujitsu is the most recent example to use the SPARC chips for their systems. From sparc.org there are some more examples.
"Deny all you want but sales of non x86 proprietary Unix boxes are dying on their ass."
Not denying, just a long time observer of the market. RISC was dying 10 years ago, but then the market for all chips exploded, taking RISC with it. Unix/RISC are still much more trusted than Linux/Intel.
Also, I know you probably understand the difference, but x86 is proprietary -- AMD had to reverse engineer it. SPARC and Power are actually open -- one of them more open than the other. Which is why we see Fujitsu working so closely with Oracle on SPARC. So your comment about "proprietary Unix boxes" is misguided at best. x86 is a Proprietary "industry standard", and not an Open standard by any accounts. That said, there is a chip that is nipping at the heels of x86 and is really giving Intel heartburn on the low end... that chip is ARM -- and it's RISC! So to say one platform has won is premature. This show is just getting interesting.
I don't mind calling someone out, but you gotta know what you're talking about when you do it.
No one is using Power/Cell in their new game consoles. That will not keep IBM making chips. What will keep IBM making chips is the Billions of dollars they get from large corporations and governments that still rely on RISC/Unix. Not just from the initial sell, but from the add on services and solutions.
Though I disagree with TPM on his comment about week cores, he seems to get it in relation to high end systems. The industry is consolidating. HP has given up at the high end. Oracle, IBM and Fujitsu are the only ones that seem to care about high-end computing. As long as there is demand (which there still is - the bleeding is leveling out) then IBM/Oracle/Fujitsu will still make money. Personally, I don't see Fujitsu doing SPARC in 10 years, but who knows? I'm not talking HPC here. There's very little profits there -- just ask SGI. HPC is about advertising, not profits.
"LOL! It looks like the denail is still strong with some Sunshiners. I remember them accusing anyone that pointed out Sun's gradual demise as "working for hp", and it seems time and that experience haven't removed the blinkers."
No, I don't remember too many people being accused of working for HP -- just you Matt. No one spends as much time, as you do, defending a major multinational corporation unless they work for said company or they make a large portion of their career/money via that company.
I see nothing in this article that Oracle is not still doing their own engineering on the Midsize to Enterprise level engineered systems. Larry has made it clear that the low end of the market is not for him. He has clearly stated that he would like to leave that part of the market to partners. Dell appears to be one of those partners. this deal makes a lot of sense given Oracle's past statements.
but at least they can't arrest me based upon what they perceive as inappropriate, or literally hold a gun to my head. They'll merely try to profit from my depravity. If a corporation is bad, then we at least have a chance of punishing them via the government or lawsuit (courts), while if the government is bad what recourse do we have... especially in a totalitarian government?
........ who believe that "Freedom of Expression" means "Freedom to say only the things that we agree with..."...
Freedom of speech means you can say anything you want and the government cannot stop you (of course, vulgarity appears to be a blaring exception). It does not mean that other citizens cannot disagree with you and voice their disagreement. If I disagree with you, I can choose to boycott you and/or your product. That is not censorship.
An example of Censorship is not allowing the press to say something controversial about the Royal Family... or even the government ownership of the major News Organization in a country. The second being less obvious, but even more insidious. If the government gives money to a News Org, then the government can withhold that money, and don't think that the News Org does not know that and act accordingly.
>I heard the cloud services team is being forced to use Exa-data and Exa-Logic to double count the hardware >dollars and cloud dollars. Rumor also has it they are not happy with Sun x86 hardware. Notice how they said >Sun hardware.
I only notice how you say these things. You like to say "I heard" allot and then act like it's fact.
I have it on great authority that the Exa-folks are very happy with the Sun Hardware, especially when compared with what they got from HP. I don't have to make up "rumors".
What utter nonsense. I've never seen Oracle invest in the future more. The Cloud is growing faster for Oracle than other cloud vendors, Fusion is starting to take hold, R&D has been in the 1-1.2 Billion range each quarter for the past two years (that's well over 4 billion a year in R&D). That's all investment in the future. That's in line with IBM, almost double SAP, and about 25% more than HP.
This assumes that Communism with a Capitalist/Slave Labor tilt will win out in the end. Russia fell as they tried to compete in the world market with a faulty moral/economic model. China will have a top and in the short term may be successful, but long term will fall as every Communist country has or will. The only thing that could stop this from happening is if the free countries move more toward communism... wait a second...
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