May 6 2009 4:55PM GMT
Posted by: Barbara Darrow
Microsoft,
Microsoft Office,
Google,
Scott McNealy,
Steve Ballmer
Last month, the New York Times brilliantly reproduced Steve Ballmer’s white boarded vision of the company’s cloud services plan. It depicts the company’s “software plus services” vision with Azure at the center of the universe, making use of SQL Server services, Exchange services etc etc. Continued »
Apr 21 2009 3:09AM GMT
Posted by: Barbara Darrow
IT channel products and technologies,
Scott McNealy,
Oracle,
Sun Microsystems,
Barbara Darrow,
IBM,
Lotus,
Hewlett-Packard,
Dell,
Storage
Here’s a completely non-scientific list of my top five questions arising from Oracle’s $7.4 billion buy out of Sun Microsystems.
5: How could it have been surprising that Oracle was the white knight here? Larry Ellison is the go-to guy for distressed tech companies who don’t want or cannot be acquired by IBM or Microsoft (hell, better throw Google into the mix for the new millenium. ) This goes way, way back. Back in the paleozoic era, Lotus Development Corp. CEO Jim Manzi tried like all get out to get Oracle to buy Lotus so it wouldn’t end up in IBM’s clutches. That didn’t work out so well.
4: What happens to Oracle’s ardent courtship of Dell and Hewlett-Packard? One can only guess that the HP-Oracle Exadata “Database machine” is a goner now. Not that it was setting any sales records.
3: Which virtualization play will survive the inevitable putsch?
2: How soon will a big hunk of Oracle’s revenue be going by way of hardware bundles with Sun servers? This is very much a page ripped right out of IBM’s DB2 playbook. And Ellison could barely contain himself when talking about that “shelfware.”
1: What was deal with Scott McNealy on the call? He sounded ummmm, medicated. Even though this signals the end of the McNealy era in tech (hell, Jonathan Schwartz and the open source pony tail epic already rang the bell on that one.) Still for $7.4 billion, couldn’t Scooter have mustered a little enthusiasm for three minutes? Listen to the playback. It’s shocking
Mar 25 2009 8:33PM GMT
Posted by: Barbara Darrow
Scott McNealy,
Sun,
IBM,
Open-source,
Barbara Darrow,
IT channel products and technologies
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.
