Having observed Oracle’s strategy now for a while since the acquisition of Sun, and many discussions with a quite a few customers, it’s clear that Oracle is gunning for the “entire vertical” model. Quite simply, their primary focus appears now to be selling an entire solution to a company, starting with the low level storage, and extending all the way to the application tier.
There’s nothing wrong with that kind of strategy – so long as it doesn’t alienate companies who want to buy piecemeal.
Oracle however are most definitely alienating the educational institutions. Several institutions I deal with now have policies that require end-of-life Sun kit to be replaced with comparable Linux or Windows solutions, unless an absolute rock-solid business case can be built.
With educational support rapidly eroding, Solaris as a tent-pole Unix platform is well and truly dead.
[Original post below, 22-04-2010]
I was told yesterday that one of the changes Oracle has wrought at Sun is the killing of all educational discount programmes. Apparently while they’re still listed on the Sun websites, they’re unavailable. Another fascinating change is collapsing support programmes from multiple levels of varying cost to one single level.
From a Unix perspective, I grew up on Solaris, and I’ve always seen the Unix world split into two camps. On one side you’ve got HPUX and AIX, dominated by ‘smit’, and the other side was led by Solaris, with Tru64 close behind.
The HPUX and AIX approach to Unix has always been an interesting one. It’s about rigid controls, and it’s appealed to formal environments and procedure-oriented enterprises. I still remember a comment made by a senior BHP IT manager when I still worked in Newcastle. I’m modifying it slightly so that this article doesn’t get mired down in faeces:
In BHP IT Melbourne if you want to go the toilet, you hold a meeting about it. In BHP IT Wollonging if you want to go to the toilet, you consult a huge procedure about doing it. In BHP IT Newcastle, you do it in the corridor while you keep going with your work.
I know, it’s a wee crass, but as much as anything I saw it as a statement about the platforms in use at the time – particularly Newcastle vs Wollongong. You see, the Newcastle Unix team was dominated by Solaris, with a few Tru64 boxes and a couple of HPUX boxes (hell, even a couple of AT&T boxes). The Wollongong team was dominated by AIX.
What it comes down to is that the administrator mentality behind Solaris is all about free thinking. Not in a hippy sort of way, but in a “hey, here’s a Unix. Do whatever the hell you like with it” sort of way. It’s the result of having year after year of students at Universities using Solaris because that was the cheapest and most flexible Unix for the Universities to deploy. In this case by “free thinking” I’m not referring to any OSS ideals, but to the notion that it’s a full Unix that isn’t constrained by what the vendor feels you should do with it.
I’m taking a roundabout way of getting there, but I think the greatest damage Oracle is doing to Solaris is making the entire Sun platform less attractive to educational markets. People tend to stick to the platforms they learn at University – at least for a while – and so the overall Sun educational discount programme has always been a very clever one: hook them while they’re still learning, teach them that they can use the platform for whatever they want, and they’ll keep coming back to it once they’re out in the work force. This becomes a very powerful drag-sales method. Graduates come out of University looking for jobs on the platforms they have experience with. As they become team leaders or middle managers, they continue to advocate those platforms unless there’s a very strong reason to void the emotional attachment they have to a platform. Net result? The discounts to the educational market are recouped through the full prices in the commercial market. (I’d suggest that at a desktop/laptop level, Apple has been working at this now for some time, and it’s starting to build momentum that Microsoft will have trouble halting.)
Oracle clearly don’t understand that drag-sales model as it has applied with Sun. By killing off educational discount programmes for the entire Sun platform and making the Solaris operating system more costly to install and support, they’re eroding the “use it for anything” base market and mind share that has always been so critical to the continuing popularity of Solaris. I’m sure HP and IBM are both very pleased with this new direction that Oracle is taking. Oracle is making the jobs of HP and IBM sales people that much easier.
If Oracle lock in their current strategy and force this change, Solaris as a tent-pole Unix platform is dead. Somehow, I doubt Oracle would even care.
Great article, I couldn’t agree more. I’ve been a unix admin for 12 years now and almost exclusively on Solaris, but the recent decline in the quality of Sun support and the stated and unstated but apparent direction of Oracle has forced us to start looking for a different default Unix platform. My bet is that Red Hat will be the biggest benefactor from the change at Sun. Sad really… I used to like Sun as a company and loved all of there server products.
Joel
Hi Preston – Great blog!
I have been Networker vetran for over 15 years and a Solaris admin for more than that, the last ten years I have been supporting a Ivy League university. I have a couple of observations on Oracle killing the educational discounts.
You nailed the intent of the educational discounts – they were intended to get students to use and learn the equipment and software and bond with it so they would want to take it with them when they left the university. This was great 10 years ago for Sun but very few universities still have solaris at the “student” level. My school the Sun lab has been filled with commodity intel systems running some form of Linux for several years now. So unfortunately that ship has sailed and Mac and Linux are filling that gap.
Here we have been using the Educational discounts to fill our server rooms and research computing labs with Sun equipment at a VERY competatitve pricing. With that gone you are correct we will be focusing on AIX in the server rooms and Intel Linux in the labs. IBM and HP already have their sales force’s at the ready…. It’s unfortunate to see what will surely be the death of Solaris as the unix operating system of choice.
We have already started to look at what applications we are running that still require the Solaris/SPARC (not X86) operating system. I still have a few – as a matter of fact my Networker Server is still on Solaris/SPARC and I will be looking to migrate to a Linux based server – that decision is directly tied to Oracle’s announcement discontinuing the educational discounts. I’d love to see a blog posting on the ins and outs of converting your networker server to a new platform.
Thanks for all your great work on this blog.
Nancy
I’ve also all but decided to move away from Solaris as our Networker platform of choice, but I can’t decide if that means Networker is also gone or if we move to the less supported Linux platforms.
Joel
Hi Joel,
These days NetWorker on Linux is getting pretty good. My primary concern remains that NetWorker on Linux works best when you can ensure that any Linux-connected tape library is FC-connected, or there’s a dedicated SCSI channel for the robot head, so there is no drive+head combination on a single channel.
Since some of my biggest customers run with Linux NetWorker servers, I feel comfortable recommending that as a stable platform these days.
Cheers,
Preston.
Hey Preston,
Thanks for the recommendation! Are most using Red Hat or some other distro?
Thanks again!
Joel
Joel,
RedHat has been pretty popular up until this point. (I suspect a lot of organisations though that are cost-constrained may start looking at CentOS now that it’s officially supported by EMC as well.)
Cheers,
Preston.
I must say I completely disagree with this assessment. Solaris is still a very high quality product, and we use it exclusively in our organization for all Unix requirements. I’ve been a Solaris admin for 4 years, and plan to continue to do so for many years to come. I’ve had my complaints about Oracle support at times, and I do miss Sun. However, their support is just as good as EMC, Symantec, etc… that I’ve worked with. SPARC hardware is very high quality, and that’s what organizations are looking for. Fujitsu especially is an excellent vendor of SPARC/Solaris hardware.
Chris,
I’m glad to hear you’ve had a better experience.
I stand by my original assessment though: I’m seeing Solaris kicked out of every single educational facility I deal with. The long-term consequences of this are massive, and are being completely underestimated by Oracle.
I’m also starting to see many of my non-educational customers enacting policies to remove Solaris at the next refresh due to the unacceptably high increase in maintenance costs. Australian customers in particular seem quite unhappy with support under Oracle vs their prior support arrangements under Solaris.
Cheers,
Preston.