There’s a report over at iTWire that has two highly pertinent details. (iTWire – Aussie storage growth above average: Gartner.)

The article is about how Australian spending on storage is growing faster than the rest of the world (IMHO that’s just further proof of how helpful the government stimulus package was), and has two particular points of interest.

First:

The big winner was EMC, which saw its revenue from the region grow from $US533.9 million to $US716.0 million. Most other vendors also saw improved revenues…

That doesn’t surprise me. As an employee of an EMC partner, I know EMC have been very strongly pushing in the Australian market over the last 12 months. I fully believe that other vendors have been pushing hard and (for the most part) achieving good results, but EMC has had a really solid story during this spending cycle, and it’s been paying off – time and time again.

What really didn’t surprise me though was the “but” following that above quote:

…but the biggest loser was Oracle. In 2009, Sun had $US134.4 million revenue in 2009. Now part of Oracle, it only recorded $US82.1 million revenue in 2010

Since the Oracle acquisition of Sun, every single one of my customers who had previously been a large Sun customer has either been resolutely turning away from the vendor, or eyeing them with firm displeasure. Why? Oracle’s higher prices for maintenance and product has had a significant impact on the budgetary options available to one of Sun’s biggest previous customer bases – the educational market. (This, for what it’s worth, is why I penned the article last year, “RIP Solaris“.)

While I’m not normally one to put much stock in analyst reports, this one seems to gel with what I’ve been seeing for the past 12 months.

 

This is an appeal for information.

I’ve heard conflicting stories and I can’t get rock solid clarification from any party. Despite Oracle initially announcing that Sun would continue to OEM NetWorker from EMC, I’ve subsequently been told by several Sun OEM customers that this has been recently abandoned. Since I’ve heard of Sun (under Oracle) dropping other contracts, it’s left me quite curious as to what the heck is going on.

If someone can give me a definitive answer, I’d appreciate it.

I want to make it plain – I’m not rumour mongering, just trying to get to the bottom of rumours.

 

There’s been much speculation as to whether Sun under Oracle would retain the EMC NetWorker OEM arrangement.

Finally there’s some details on Sun’s website under the banner “Sun and EMC“. In it, they state:

Sun will continue to OEM the EMC NetWorker software for backup and recovery which enables Sun to continue offering the EMC software as Sun StorageTek Enterprise Backup Software.

So, business as usual?

Unfortunately it looks like “yes”. Don’t get me wrong, I teethed on Solstice Backup, as it was called then – in fact I used Solstice Backup for 4 years before I even installed NetWorker as a non-OEM product.

Here’s the rub: Sun have been woeful at (a) supporting “NetWorker” in the rebadged form, and (b) providing patches in a timely manner. Again and again, I get complaints from Sun OEM customers that Sun takes ages to update their releases in sync with EMC’s releases. I also hear frequent tales of OEM NetWorker support cases with Sun that take forever. Both of these factors well and truly gel with my experience as a Sun customer in the late 90′s, and I’m still hearing the same stories in the hear and now.

Disclaimer: I sell and support EMC NetWorker native. That should have been obvious but I don’t want to be accused of hiding this.

I didn’t think Sun’s statement went far enough. I don’t want to hear that they’re going to continue to OEM NetWorker, I want to hear that they’re going to OEM NetWorker and pick up their game. Release cycles should be much closer tied to NetWorker, support needs to be considerably improved, and patches need to come out sooner to OEM NetWorker as EMC actually release.

If they’re not, then when you factor in the changes that Oracle are making to Solaris OS licensing, I’m expecting that the reasons for people remaining with the OEM version of NetWorker to shrink considerably.

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