Oracle-Sun Hardware: Easy to say and Hard to do – Oracle's Exadata 2

More than 10 years ago I was invited by Oracle Distributor or Oracle Israel (I do not remember if an Oracle's local branch was already established) to a dramatic announcement by Larry Ellison. Tel-Aviv was one of the cities in which you can watch it in real time. Oracle in cooperation with Sun announced the age of Network Computing.

It was a good show. Larry Ellison broke a PC demonstrating that Microsoft's Fat Client applications and data were lost. He also broke a cheaper Network Computer (NC) and demonstrated that nothing was lost after using another NC for connecting to the Web. Network Computing was immature. It took some years until Google's applications as well as other Web 2.0

Services vendors' products were used and more than 10 years until SaaS is going

Mainstream and Cloud Computing services are used for some enterprise applications. Oracle and Sun anti-Microsoft campaign continued with J2EE vs. .Net wars. However, few years afterwards both companies signed cooperation agreements with Microsoft.

I recall this brief Oracle's history while reading articles on Oracle's Exadata version 2. According to some of the articles "He (Larry Ellison)'s so furious that he's dumping HP as the hardware partner".

It is true that it took a lot of time until USA regulators approved Oracle's Sun acquisition and that the deal is waiting for European regulators approval, because of database and Java anti-trust issues.

It is also true that IBM and HP and to lesser extent Dell, take advantage of the delays and snatched some of Sun's hardware customer Install Base.

But I would doubt if that was the reason for Oracle to abandon the Exadta partnership with HP described by Ellison as "Oracle's most successful introduction ever" few months ago. As the Oracle-Microsoft history cited above shows Oracle's decisions are not emotional decisions based on Ellison's Love, Hate or Anger, but rather Business centered decisions.

As I already mentioned in previous post Oracle is not a hardware vendor and in my opinion (which is supported by other hardware vendors snatching Sun's hardware customers) supporting and extending Sun's hardware Business Lines is a major issue.

I was also skeptic about Oracle's Vision of Car like combined Hardware Software products.

I will analyze Exadata 2 technical aspects in a next post, but it should be noticed that although it is based on Sun's hardware solutions it is based on standard Intel processors and not on Sun's SPARC processors, supporting the view that SPARC processors are nearing their End of Life period.

Another concern for Oracle and its customers is: What should current users of Exadata 1 customers do?

My Take

I still do not think that Oracle is a Hardware vendor and may not be in the future.

Exadata 2 announcement does not prove the thesis that it will become a hardware vendor.

I am not sure that other storage vendors together with Database producer will follow Oracle (IBM, HP with Microsoft, EMC with Microsoft, Netapp with Microsoft).

It is too early to reject the hypothesis that Oracle's Sun acquisition deal will turn into selling Sun's hardware Business Lines to HP or to another hardware vendor or vendors as described by some analysts after the Sun's acquisition announcement, raised again in IT Web journals few days ago and mentioned as a possibility in one of my Vendors Survival posts.

Oracle may sell only viable part of Sun's hardware business lines.

If Exadata 2 will be successful it may be included in such a future deal. .

Can SOA architects be young?

After vacation of three weeks (without any posts in my blog), I read an interesting article in The Enterprise Architecture Online User Group site. The article is about Experience and Enterprise Architecture. The article's title is: Can Enterprise architects be young?

The opinion of the article composer is: "So, every time that I see a young gentleman who claims to be an enterprise architect or enterprise architect expert, I simply don't believe him".

SOA is a style of Enterprise Architecture (EA). In most cases, SOA is composing only a part of enterprise architecture, especially in the long journey of transformation from older architectures.

Therefore EA considerations explained in the article are applicable to SOA too. I would paraphrase the article's conclusion and say: Every time that I see a young gentleman who claims to be a SOA architect or SOA architect expert, I simply don't believe him.