Oracle’s Exadata Refresh Ups Ante on Technology and Selling Strategy

November 11, 2010 by 3 Comments

The Exadata marketing story is unrelenting, and Oracle backed it with plenty of happy customers for analysts to query at Open World this year. The stories were compelling; I’ll mention a few below. In the analyst pitch, we were shown a couple of dozen logos – good for a still relatively new high-end, long sales cycle, longer still production ramp up, product. The numbers are not Teradata rates yet, but CEO Larry Ellison claims a $1.5B pipeline.  Whether you believe it or don’t, he’s telling the world – and if he misses by much, Wall Street will spank the stock, so personally I doubt that he’s pushing too far past his real expectations. The big news, of course, was a refresh of the product itself, as Oracle gets deeper into the power of leveraging hardware and software design together. Read more of this post

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Migrate From Mainframe? To What?

June 24, 2010 by 19 Comments

From Joe Clabby, www.clabbyanalytics.com

Gartner, the industry’s preeminent information technology (IT) research and analysis firm, has published several reports and case studies over the past few years that promote the idea that IT buyers should migrate their applications off of mainframes and move them to other, more “modern platforms”.  Part of Gartner’s logic, it appears, is that there is an impending-doom shortage of mainframe managers that is about to occur as elderly mainframe managers retire — so Gartner implies that moving applications to other “more modern” platforms might ensure the long term viability of enterprise applications on those platforms.

I have two major issues with Gartner’s perspective and its recommendation:

  1. Where is the proof that mainframe skills will decline to critical levels over the next several years?  And,
  2. Which “modern platform” is Gartner advocating? Read more of this post

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Microsoft Ends Itanium Support — Parsing the Clues

April 10, 2010 by Leave a comment

By Charles King, Pund-IT, Inc. – I’m delighted to welcome Charles as a contributor. This piece was published in the PUND-IT newsletter.

In a blog, Dan Reger, senior technical product manager for Microsoft’s Windows Server group, announced that Windows Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2008 R2 and Visual Studio 2010 will be the last Microsoft products to support Intel’s Itanium microprocessor architecture. Mainstream support for Windows Server 2008 for Itanium-based Systems (and R2) will end, in accordance with Microsoft’s Support Lifecycle Policy, on July 9, 2013, while extended support will continue until July 10, 2018. Read more of this post

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And Then There Were Three: POWER, x86 and z

April 5, 2010 by 1 Comment

by Joe Clabby, President, Clabby Analytics. Updated from a November 2009 publication

There is a major shakeout underway in the midrange/high-end server marketplace as sales of Sun SPARC/CMT (cellular multi-threading) and Hewlett-Packard (HP) Itanium-based servers decline significantly — and as new, more powerful versions of Intel’s Xeon and IBM’s POWER micro-architectures come to market. Read more of this post

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