Paranoia Strikes Armonk

Since Oracle bought Sun, I've been (uniquely, so far as I know) insisting that Larry's goal was to suck up IBM's mainframe clients, since they're the last significant number (and of really good size) of "legacy" installs to be had.  Until today, the Usual Pundits haven't agreed.  Ah, but news is news.

Today's Times tells us about the annual lovefest, and in the process, explicates Larry's goal.  Following are a couple of quotes.


"But through its acquisition spree, Oracle moved well beyond the database and into business software, buying up the important products that companies use to keep track of their technology infrastructure, employees, sales, inventory and customers."

IBM did this in the mainframe world, initially by supplying the applications themselves.  Once they killed off the Seven Dwarves (wikipedia for:  IBM Seven Dwarves, for a decent bit of history), and the DoJ got under their saddle, letting software vendors work on the machines was allowed.  Larry's strategy was clear before, but can't be ignored now:  buy up the Oracle based  application software used by the Fortune X00 (and let your fingers do the searching for how well that's gone for the clients of the bought out companies), then build a machine that's tied to the database.  Just what IBM has, for now at least.


"With Sun, Oracle has found a way to sell customers hardware bundled with all that software in a fashion similar to that of its main database rival, I.B.M.  Oracle executives say they can build better, faster, cheaper products this way by engineering complete systems rather than requiring customers to cobble together the parts."

Well, monocultures (the term often used to describe Windows, and explain the virus vulnerability of it) are never a good thing. 


"But customers are objecting to Oracle's moves. For example, some of Sun's largest former customers consist of the large Wall Street players, and they pushed back this year when Oracle moved to limit their choices around the Sun technology. Oracle ultimately gave in to their pleas, reaffirming deals that would let Hewlett-Packard and Dell offer prized Sun software on their hardware."


That first picture in the article is the newest toy, the Exalogic machine.  Letting my fingers do the searching, I came up with this Oracle page.  Of note; it's built on SSD.  Armonk, we have an attack!!