Sun

Top five IT channel lessons for the quarter

VARs remain extremely cautious on public cloud computing and are obsessed with which vendor giants will remain standing after more expected M&A activity. Those are but two highlights of this quarter’s SearchITChannel.com Advisory Board call. But there more below:  

1: Fear the cloud: Okay, that verbiage may be overkill, but the VARs said they spend a lot of time educating customers about when and if public cloud computing will really meet their needs. Vendor hype aside, board members said public cloud scenarios run counter to HIPAA and other compliance regulations.

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Sun to cut 3K jobs

Guess Larry Ellison wasn’t kidding  about Sun Microsystems bleeding red ink while European regulators weigh Oracle’s buyout plan.

In an SEC filing, Sun said it will cut 3,000 jobs worldwide over the next year. That’s about 10% of its urrent headcount. More on the Sun layoffs here.

Last Sunday,  Oracle CEO Larry Ellison told thousands of Sun and Oracle customers at Oracle OpenWorld  that Sun was losing $100 million a month while the European Commission considered Oracle’s $7.4 billion buyout of the hardware and Java maker.

Check out more IT channel news on SearchITChannel.com.

Sun partners burnt at Oracle OpenWorld

Oracle OpenWorld 2009 did  not open well for Sun partners who are already reaching for anti-anxiety meds as the Sun Microsystems acquisition finalizes. Continued »

Top five questions for Oracle OpenWorld 2009

This’ll be easy. As Oracle keeps trying to close its Sun Microsystems acquisition, the top Oracle OpenWorld queries are locked up this year. But partners and solution providers still have other nagging issues they want addressed at the show. So, here goes:

1: What will Oracle do with Sun hardware (and Sun’s hardware channel?) Granted, with those pesky EU regulators breathing down it’s neck–mostly on MySQL questions–Larry Ellison needs to reassure Sun partners and customers that Oracle wants their business but without saying anything detailed that could further inflame the law-and-order crowd.

2: Specifically, how will Oracle deal with Exadata? The first, HP-based big-bang “database machine”  was a direct sale from Oracle although any Oracle partner worth his or her salt knows that can be finessed if they file a non-standard deal and can best the Oracle rep. With a new Sun-based box, will Sun hardware partners get to play? If so, how much will they love competing with Oracle partners (and Oracle direct sales?)

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The Oracle conspiracy

For those who attribute Machiavellian motivations to everything Larry Ellison does, here’s a doozy of a theory.

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Oh wait! There’s more

Still more news from HP just as folks were trying to digest the juicy tidbit that it’s about to meld its printer and PC businesses into one. 

This news is official, however. HP  brought in a former Sun exec to run sales for its  big storage, server and networking business in the Americas. Gee, I wonder what brought that on?  Randy Seidl will be senior vice president of Enterprise Servers and Storage  (ESS) and Networking Group, reporting to executive vice president Dave Donatelli. Continued »

Conglomeration conga

Whether Sun and IBM ever actually do tie the knot, the M&A craziness will continue.  It’s interesting to parse reactions to this possible deal. For IT shops, there’s angst because some Sun partisans hate IBM and people with religious devotion to IBM won’t touch Sun. If those two data center giants converge, the fear is less competition and higher prices.

VARs are acutely interested in this because a vendor they may have been selling against may soon magically morph into their vendor.  This raises interesting channel conflict issues. Despite its well-documented troubles, Sun has gotten good reviews for its channel management by a handful of its elite partners. They’re not eager to be thrown into the IBM pot.

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McNealy on IBM rumors

What is Scott McNealy’s take on the much-reported IBM/Sun combo under discussion? According to Alex Barrett, pretty much what you’d expect.  As in:

“I can’t comment, but if we were to buy IBM, I can tell you that we would open source AIX, DB2 and all that proprietary mainframe stuff…..But we only have $3 billion in the bank, and I’d want to keep at least $1 billion, so I don’t know about the ROI.”

Barrett attended an executive breakfast in Boston Wednesday featuring the recently elusive Sun chairman. You can bet when Sun planned this little lovefest, it didn’t expect to be facing the IBM tsunami. The subject, after all, was supposed to be Sun’s big bet on open source technologies and solutions blah blah blah. But of course what everyone wanted to know was all about IBM. And Scooter didn’t disappoint.

Possible Sun deal opens can o’ worms for IBM

Here’s a reminder that Microsoft isn’t the only tech vendor known for its hardball tactics. When it comes to monopolistic practices in the computer business, many say IBM wrote the book.

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Sun-IBM as Tupac-Notorious BIG

Storage Soup has the best take on the much-talked about IBM-Sun takeout story.  IBM as Biggie Smalls? Brilliant.

As for VARs, most seem to divide along party lines. IBM VARs love it, Sun VARs, not so much. Mike Davis of Applied Computer Solutions sees only good.

But then again, he does a lot of business with both sides–six figures in IBM and eight figures in Sun. Talk about win win.