Sun shops unnerved by Oracle Alpha man
The Larry Factor
Customer Success Testimonial: Recovery is Everything
It's open season on customers running Sun Microsystems.
On Tuesday -the day before Oracle was due to announce which Sun products it's keeping and their roadmaps - Sun nemesis IBM's tried once more to exploit lingering uncertainty over Sun's products that's been generated by the Oracle purchase.
IBM's updated Migration Factory will feature software that automates moving applications and middleware from Sun's Solaris to Linux or IBM's AIX operating systems.
Migration campaigns have been a regular feature of the rough-and-tumble relationship between IBM, Sun, and Hewlett-Packard over the years
This time, though, the offers go beyond the usual day-to-day competitive swipes, seeking to exploit some very real concerns over the future for Sun's hardware and software under Oracle.
And while Sun's chief executive Jonathan Schwartz and Oracle's top brass have made great play about how their multi-billion-dollar deal will deliver fully integrated systems to the benefit of all, these re-assurances address only some concerns of the Sun faithful.
Customers are bothered by how much control they'll be ceding over things like licensing negotiations and the leverage they'll have over their IT supplier once they become even more dependent on Oracle. Also, people are worried about what impact the red-blooded Oracle's corporate culture will have on the their vendor relationship.
Oracle software licensing and support specialist Rocela told The Reg that 30 per cent of its users feel this way. These are companies already running Sun and Oracle, and they are not the type that are easily intimidated. They include major multinationals and big household names in retail, banking, manufacturing, and power.
Martin Mutch, Rocela chief executive, said it's the complexity of Oracle's licensing that makes Sun customers feel like they're about to lose control to the database giant.
This complexity will make it harder for them to determine if they are getting genuine value from their licensing if - and when - Oracle increases the prices of the old vendor's products. Oracle's sales reps are notorious for making hefty discounts in the field.
Sun users became comfortable in their relationship with their IT supplier. The problem for Oracle is they equated Sun with nice values like "innovation" and "integrity" and rated its employees as being "quite nice people." Oracle has a reputation for "business value" and maximizing its own earnings per share, with users worried Oracle will be the dominant partner.
"There's a nervousness about how this will work," Mutch said.
He noted Oracle's rambunctious and Alpha-male CEO Larry Ellison is also preying on customers' minds, with people gripped by a love-hate relationship with the man. Mutch said that while Ellison is known for turning out "good product" and having a good management structure in place "there's always that sense of what's he going to do next?".
Next page: Uncertainty roapmap
COMMENTS
Self serving
"Martin Mutch, Rocela chief executive, said it's the complexity of Oracle's licensing that makes Sun customers feel like they're about to lose control to the database giant."
To be fair, Rocela (clever re-arrangement of a well known vendors name) make their money by showing Oracle customers how to save money on their overcomplicated Oracle licenses.
Oracle license complexity is what powers their business - anything that makes more complexity or fear about complexity is good news for Rocela.
FUD
If you haven't got a team of Contract specialists, life is easier moving to cheaper systems with no armlock. Only FUDproof shops would think of putting themselves in the clutches of cold blue-blooded IBM. You can stick with Solaris if you want stability, and at least have the choice of cheaper 3rd party support and non-Vendor hardware upgrades.
Don't forget that moving Oracle to a new platform is mucho expensive, but then, so are the costs of all those itinerant code-corrupting hit-and-run programmers. Takes some working out.
Basically did the same thing
We actually started to plan for the migration in late 2008 (our move was a good one considering a few months later Sun was looking for a buyer). We still have some Sun boxes left (a couple of T2's, M4k's, and M5k's) but the older Sun boxes are now gone. Most likely in a few years our Sun gear will be gone (need to get the ROI out of the boxes that still work fine).
We went with open source for some (either RedHat or CentOS) to replace the Solaris apps/infrastructure systems and AIX on our EMR and ERP. We even converted some of the old SUN app's to Windows (not a windows fan but for some apps it made sense) .
Anyways, not sure if we convert back to Oracle/SUN, but you never know. I remember back in mid 90's I was helping convert off of AIX to Solaris. Now some of it it's back the other way.
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