Oracle: IBM, Come Out to Play-ee-ay
by John Paczkowski
Posted on September 10, 2009 at 8:50 AM PT
Oracle has a message for CIOs and Sun customers concerned about its plans for Sun’s hardware, Solaris and SPARC businesses: Relax. In a full-page ad published in The Wall Street Journal today, the database giant made a very public commitment to all of them and told customers there’s no reason to consider jumping ship for IBM. “We’re in it to win it,” Oracle CEO Larry Ellison boasts in the ad. “IBM, we’re looking forward to competing with you in the hardware business.”
Welcome news for Sun (JAVA) engineers worried they might lose their jobs as a result of Oracle’s (ORCL) surprise acquisition of the company. Bad news for rivals like Dell (DELL), HP (HPQ), and, of course, IBM (IBM). Clearly, Oracle plans to make their lives a lot more difficult.
Comments
This is a great move by Oracle.
It used to be you doubled the speed of your computer by waiting 2 years and buying a new one, but that time has passed since we hit the limits of how much you can do with a single core.
Now, if you want to double the speed of a computer, you have to do more system-wide design-oriented things:
- add an H.264 decoder to the GPU
- replace Internet Explorer with Safari or Chrome
- get everything running x64 instead of x32 to get more registers and so on
- run more of your software code on the programmable GPU
- make sure everything runs parallel so you are hitting all your processor cores
- tune the whole hardware/software system for a specific task such as Web serving or video editing instead of for general purpose use
All of this also goes for when you want to double the battery life of a computer. All the same kinds of optimizations apply. The reason the iPhone gets much better battery life than all others is not just its large battery but also its very power-efficient core OS kernel that aggressively sleeps unused resources.
Oracle has a chance to do for the enterprise what Apple did for consumers over the past 10 years: create solutions instead of I-T work.
Posted by Fred Hamranhansenhansen at September 10th, 2009 at 4:51 pm