"Sales of Oracle’s servers declined 11% in the period. Catz said the company has chosen to “downsize our low-margin legacy hardware business,” which Oracle acquired when it bought Sun Microsystems."
Very sad to see a wonderful company the victim of cost cutting.
HW has contributed $2B a year to the bottom line for about 10 years.
Since O paid about $5B for SUNW, that purchase has more than paid for itself.
I was unaware there was still a low-margin legacy hardware business to downsize. Thought that had been done a year or two ago.
FWIW, this year's HW layoff was minuscule compared to the 2017 layoff.
"Most of the value in Sun purchase was actually realestate/campuses."
The Santa Clara Campus has to be worth a pretty penny
HW has contributed $2B a year to the bottom line for about 10 years. Nothing to sneeze at, its only sin is that it's a stagnant business.
@ZEbzI5B-1vsa : perfectly said, the Sun acquisition was merely a financial operation in which Oracle gained a couple B$. LE never intended to start an HW business.
“You know the story well. FYI IBM nearly bought Sun except they weren't going to be so generous to the execs so it was squashed. JS was actually for this deal instead of going to ORCL but was out voted and out numbered.”
Yes, the handpicked by Scooter successor a.k.a. Pony Boy suddenly remembered his McKinsey management consulting background after failing spectacularly at the free software brings in hardware revenue strategy. For years at Sun, we got emails about the importance of management succession to the future of the company. And that’s the guy we ended up with. It was a nightmare.
You know the story well. FYI IBM nearly bought Sun except they weren't going to be so generous to the execs so it was squashed. JS was actually for this deal instead of going to ORCL but was out voted and out numbered.
Sun had cash in the bank, Oracle bought that, and came out with a couple of $B, so it was a money making exchange for Oracle. People running Sun made their millions, didn't care about the people or technologies, sold for the best deal with the biggest personal executive payouts possible. Oracle basically did the Sun execs a "favor". Oracle never had real plans to leverage Sun technology, they wanted the short term cash and the patents, almost all of Sun tech was shelved on day one. BTW - Sun had one of the first cloud deployments, ahead of Amazon at the time. But it wasn't made by big-O so "not made here, so no good" and shuttered it to start all over many years later. The contactless store checkout that Amazon does at their brick and mortar stores, was on display at Sun in 2001 in the briefing center at the "Facebook" campus. The destiny of SPARC and Sun software was set by the bad executive management years before the acquisition, and it never recovered because no one had the incentive to do so. Great technology gone, replaced by commodity parts and devops where continuous breakage is okay as long as it is fixed in the next sprint. Sun was completely dead the day it was acquired, most just didn't realize it then.
"Most of the value in Sun purchase was actually realestate/campuses."
If that is the case, then why buy them? Nobody bought SGI.
This includes Exa.
No it is not, but how is it broken out? x86? Sparc? appliance? Storage?
They said legacy, I would assume that meant sparc. Not questioning, just asking.
The HW biz still generates $4B in annual sales. That's not chump change.
It could mean everything will go into EOSL. In other words no more service support.
Correct me if I am wrong but isn't Exa gear x86? SuperCluster was SPARC but I don't know what else, it's been a long time for me..
I was unaware there was still a low-margin legacy hardware business to downsize. Thought that had been done a year or two ago. Do they mean the Exa stuff?
Not unexpected. In fact, I am surprised it took this long.
Signed,
Former Sun Employee
Are you saying Sun was the "wonderful company", and that Oracle cost cutting is the reason?
Sun wasn't selling enough hardware to stay afloat before Oracle bought them, so it's no surprise they're still not selling enough. Commodity hardware (x86) on free OS (Linux) is simply the better value proposition.