Looking to leave to Amazon lab; am now with Oracle sparc servers CA. Trying to grow my career before they move my job to India or China. China will soon be serious competitor in the cloud server market.
4 replies (most recent on top)
sparc will be around for a long time to come. there are several designs in the pipeline and a roadmap well past 2019. if anything, innovation on sparc is picking up. expect to see more software in silicon and other unique acceleration features in upcoming chips.
Consider the strategy set in 2010 has resulted in decease of sparc sales. A failed strategy that is unlikely to be reversed any time soon. R&D will shrink for sparc development lack of ROI.
Hard to say Oracle will have pricing pressure as the rest of the industry moves toward common platforms and lower wage foreign labor. They could decide to go with the minimum sparc platforms for certain customers but I see the future dimming out for sparc systems. IBM Power 9 is going to take market share from Intel and ARMy is marching in. More choices more pressure on what customers may see as a commodity. If they don't get much more for what they pay for why buy the cadillac when the corolla will do?
In 2008 Sun sold 300K Sparc servers. Last year sold less than 50K Sparc servers. The roadmap for Sparc current ends in 2019 unless someone has seen a new one. The hardware business is bad for Oracle. MH will change that by doing his consolidations and axing. Look at what he did at HP.