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.<\/p>\n
There’s nothing wrong with that kind of strategy \u2013 so long as it doesn’t alienate companies who want to buy piecemeal.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
With educational support rapidly eroding, Solaris as a tent-pole Unix platform is well and truly dead.<\/p>\n
[Original post below, 22-04-2010]<\/strong><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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:<\/p>\n 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 at least for a while \u2013 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.)<\/p>\n 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<\/em> pleased with this new direction that Oracle is taking. Oracle is making the jobs of HP and IBM sales people that much easier.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Having observed Oracle’s strategy now for a while since the acquisition of Sun, and many discussions with a quite a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,12],"tags":[706,909],"class_list":["post-2208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aside","category-general-technology","tag-oracle","tag-solaris"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pKpIN-zC","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2208"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2208\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7560,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2208\/revisions\/7560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}