All hands meetings being cancelled on orders from legal to prevent news from spreading.
Hardware teams being told to cease development.
There will be no Solaris 12, final release will be 11.4.
Orders coming straight from Larry.
No info on timing yet.
what's the point of digging up a 3 year old thread?
we all know sparc and solaris is dead and buried.
let them rip.
190K views, 300 replies LOL
It stared when AB convinced Sun x86 was as good as SPARC. We (as a customer) moved from all Sun to Linux/86 grids for our silicon dev apps. The relative superiority of SPARC was gone. Niagara was the icing on the cake. Significant shortfall in single thread perf AND forcing customer to upgrade Solaris -- again. Then Sun failed/cancelled the HiPo multicore chip. By the time LE figured things out it was too late. He tried to fix the perf issues, but the ship, as they say, had sailed.
March 10th 2017, The chilean system support center has been closed, arround 130 system engeneers has been layed off. The worst part of the story that the Chilean team were supporting certain products which aren't supported in no other geo place there is no redundancy, so the support can't longer provided to customers. Based on these histories in my humble opinion Oracle is not longer interested into HW otherwise they would think about it. Only few Director knew and toke precautions some other dont so this confirms that the decitions were taken at a very high level (MH). We will confirm it on march 15th on the next Financial Report that HW is shrinking on Financial results. There is no doubt that cloud is the future and Oracle pushes all effort into cloud indipendent if they sell it or gift it as long they can grow their market share.
450 confirmed out in Santa Clara hardware:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/23/oracle_layoffs_in_hardware_div/
More to come.
Wasn't it rather obvious, at least if you were inside the company?
I am remotely involved with Solaris/Systems and I still know/heard about it in Nov?
@OP - @KBEVoB1-ennp or @ennp - whatever your name is...
I'd like to say thank you for the original post - this rumor was original reported by you on 29 November 2016 - everything turned out to be true. Now we have the Solaris roadmap w/out 12, now we have hundreds of layoffs in all teams that have anything to do with the product.
You called this one correctly and well ahead of everyone - well done and thank you!
Any updates here?
There is a spinoff thread on the same topic here:
or you can go here
www.thelayoff.com/t/KTCW4qz
The problem is not only solaris sellability but it also mess around with openstack and other linux-y open source stuff, and for what? Wrong strategy imo. It all makes sense in the end, the writing has been on the wall.
Keep up, Son... see the Bollocks thread for some slightly more current info...
S12 is meant to ship in 2017. S11.4 was cancelled in 2016.
Previous Post meant for jbwm.
@wjbm
Are you referring to Solaris group as opposed to sparc hw teams? Which locations?
No rumor here. Selected folks are being redirected to Cloud/Linux development.
For those not offered to move (and I am one of them) - RIF will happen in
Jan 2017. Of course small % of folks will be allowed to stay to keep the Solaris/Sparc
lights going for a little longer.. It's going to get ugly in Jan 2017.
No longer a rumor. My boss came to talk to me yesterday about the news. We are either getting package or moved to other functions if deemed necessary.
@KBEVoB1-hezy let me educate you. 7x intel boxes [exadata, exalogic, exalytics x86, pca, bda, oda] & 3x sparc boxes [supercluster, minicluster, exalytics sparc]. considering the fact that supercluster is a higher-end box that does the job of exadata, exalogic & partially pca at the same time, that's an acceptable ratio of x86 to sparc.
no-one uses supercluster? that's not my experience. there is a good mix of all of the above within the region where i work. the only reason exadata gets more volume is the lower entry point and the oracle db market share
Exadata is definitely a DB thing so not run/developed by systems.
@KBEVoB1-hykt please tell me which engineered system is based on SPARC? R u talking about supercluster? No one uses that, u know that right? And I know for a fact (as customer dealing with sales) they aren't selling the exalogic or pca much either. Exadata is probably the only one.
As far as I can tell there's no breakout of how many engineered systems have been sold. I am suspicious of that tale that traditional hw is down being offset by systems sales. Who can find some proof in the earnings report? I'd appreciate to see it.
You eithrr heard what you wanted to hear, or deliberately lying.
They said that traditional server business is going down and that Engineered Systems are going up. Engineered Systems are not only Exa (Intel based) but also Solaris/SPARC based.
Exadata has nothing to do with Solaris/Sparc. It's commodity hardware tuned to run the Oracle Database. Systems? are you in Sales or Support?
What areas support exadata? I'm interviewing for systems.
Deniers go and listen to the recording of the earnings call: HW other than Exa is toast - Hurd and catz could not have been clearer about it
Facts are stubborn things. There is no need for you to try countering facts.
Unless you work for some Reputation Management PR company hired by Oracle.
Wow so much Fake News and FUD here spread by competitors.
SPARC and Solaris are being developed further wait and see.
Also Oracle wouldn't ditch hardware either as they make a lot of their money from engineered systems so that makes absolutely no sense.
Ive been searching all the IBM rumors and doesn’t appear that anyone is questioning the longevity of Power & AIX considering IBM reported -14% Power revenue decline in Q1FY16, -24% decline Q2FY16 and -31% decline in latest Q3FY16.
There already are IBM POWER8 offerings/servers that are Linux only and not available to AIX, like 1U POWER8 server. PowerVM does not exist without Linux (HMC/PowerVC/NovaLink/...).
With Power9 atleast a year away (they say), how many here bet which direction revenue will continue? How long can you sustain such incredible double-digit declines?
IBM recently PAID (not got paid) 1 500 000 000 (1.5b) to GlobalFoundaries (same people behind AMD/ARM) so they would make POWER chips instead of IBM. You do not PAY external entity to make your most important technology/CPUs, arent you? And this is what IBM did.
"we are proactively evaluating our expense infrastructure needed to support the on-premise hardware business in light of on-premise hardware revenue declines and the new availability of IaaS for their customers." - Catz, Safra
http://seekingalpha.com/article/4030875-oracles-orcl-ceo-mark-hurd-q2-2017-results-earnings-call-transcript?page=2
Its amazing how Oracle announces a -12% decline in HW sales and everyone believes it’s the end of the world and Oracle is going to drop Solaris & SPARC. Ive been searching all the IBM rumors and doesn’t appear that anyone is questioning the longevity of Power & AIX considering IBM reported -14% Power revenue decline in Q1FY16, -24% decline Q2FY16 and -31% decline in latest Q3FY16. How is that possible? With Power9 atleast a year away (they say), how many here bet which direction revenue will continue? How long can you sustain such incredible double-digit declines?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/16/oracle_q2_fy2017_layoff_rumors/
Speculation is rife on anonymous internet boards, and it's been suggested by some of our industry contacts, that Oracle may lay off as many as half of its 4,000 or so people working on server and networking hardware, that the Sparc division is not long for this world, and that Solaris 12 will be canceled and the operating system put into maintenance mode.
Oracle has said none of the rumors are true. The database giant announced its latest quarterly financial figures on Thursday, and made no mention of any major cuts. On a conference call with analysts shortly after, co-CEO Safra Catz said:
"We are proactively evaluating our expense infrastructure needed to support the on-premises hardware business in light of on-premises hardware revenue declines."
@ gjjp
A couple of points to counter your arguments:
Yes, Oracle reported -12% decline in Hardware products this Q2FY17, however, as Oracle's hardware is now being installed into Oracle's cloud (IaaS), and its also the hardware driving its SaaS and PaaS offerings (Oracl'es capital expenditures), its being offset (almost) by the increasing revenues of +9% for IaaS, 83% increase in SaaS/PaaS. Oracle Cloud (SaaS/PaaS/IaaS) has now achieved over $1BN in revenue this Q2 with considerable growth that’s expected to continue as mentioned by Safra during the earnings call.
2nd point, revenue is almost a misleading indicator today as you can make 10's of Billions$ in revenue and make no margin, essentially not making any profit off of the sales. Just ask IBM why it sold its x86 business to the chinese, HP has split into HPE and beyond, Dell went private, and Cisco also hurting, etc. Making revenue isn't enough. Its making margin/profit that matters cause that’s where you get budget to invest in R&D. Oracles operating margin is a very healthy 34%.
Back in the Sun days (Im an Ex-Sun employee), we sold billions in hardware (as you mentioned), however, the margins were quite low in the 10-15% range. Not sufficient to sustain the business long term and why they sold out to Oracle. When Oracle took over, they killed all the low margin HW products and now sells systems that add significant value like integration and therefore justify higher margins.
And finally, if you look at the list price of Sun's last high end systems sold before Oracle, the E25K, they sold for $3-5M each. Today, an Oracle SPARC M7-16 which is ~30x faster (in less than ten years!) is one third the list price. A SPARC T7-1 @ less than $60K will outperform the E25K with ease. So Oracle would have to sell anywhere from 3x to 10x more of these systems to make the same revenue but when you have such a powerful machine, there are fewer customers needing this level of power and so they buy even lower end systems, reducing the revenue further. I believe this is one of the key factors why Oracle is making significant less HW revenue than previously as the price/performance has had a significant drop since the SPARC T5/SPARC M6/SPARC M7/SPARC T7 systems have come out.
Oracle Q2FY17 hardware products revenue - down 13%
Oracle Q2FY17 hardware support revenue - down 6%
Reach your own conclusions.
In Oracle-land, this is called "hardware revenue growth".
The funny thing about Oracle's earnings calls is that they keep playing these games with "constant currency" vs. "non-constant currency", GAAP vs. non-GAAP.
GAAP is relevant and meaningful. Non-GAAP is fictional bulslhit.
People aren't as gullible as Oracle's senior management wants everyone to believe.
You are spot on. The numbers for sparc server sales has been dismal and declining. I had the number and will dig it out.
Mostly people are in deep denial over sparc. Oracle/LE kool aid. Not that I blame them servers are commodity where will they find work?
Is it only me, or others too, I don't know, but as of today, Solaris 12 beta collaboration site seems to be down. If the rumour is true, Unix world will suffer quite a loss on versatility, innovation and competition.
gnwv HP-UX is dead. There won't be new processors. It is a non sense to compare Oracle with HP-UX.
It is normal that all OS: Linux, AIX, Solaris take share from HP-UX.
The actual state of HP-UX seems the future state for SPARC/Oracle.
The first step of HP-UX long time ago, was not release new versions of operative system. Only maintenance patches. Do you see that this is similar to Oracle?
The numbers that you give about Solaris sales. Have you read about the constant decline of Oracle hardware sales every year? the last fiscal year was a 10%.
https://www.sec.gov/edgar/searchedgar/companysearch.html
That is the Securities and Exchange Commission's company filings search page.
Search for Sun Microsystems' 10Q filings. In 2009, the year before Sun was gobbled by Oracle, Sun was doing somewhere around USD $2 Billion of hardware business a quarter. Yes, you read that right: Two Billion United States Dollars a quarter. 2009 was a very bad business year for Sun.
Oracle PR Management boy is now bragging about 1.6 bilion a year in hardware business in 2014.
Congratulations, Oracle. Sun's hardware business has "grown" by going from USD $8 Billion a year in 2009 to USD $1.6 Billion a year in 2014. And I have my own doubts about Oracle's numbers.
Solaris is dying? Solaris support is poor? Oracle not investing in Solaris anymore? Seriously-who are making these claims because the facts state otherwise?
According to Gartner, Solaris has actually been growing marketshare (within albeit a shrinking pie). Gartner in February has been quoted as saying "Oracle has been able to increase its Unix market share during 2014 (breaking a seven-year pattern of declining share); the share gains have been maintained through 2015" and "Solaris is particularly well-suited to users who want to concentrate on running Oracle software workloads, and there is some early evidence that Oracle is able to attract some migrating HP-UX and/or AIX users who would otherwise have probably migrated to Linux on x86."
See here: https://www.gartner.com/doc/3220521/vendor-blink-battle-unix-viable
According to the latest Server sales figures from these analysts, Solaris shipped on about $1.6BN worth of servers during 2015 (that’s about 52K servers mostly SPARC from Oracle and Fujitsu and some x86 sold by Dell/HP/Lenovo reselling Solaris on their systems) . Over 1.6 BILLION dollars in revenue tied to Solaris during 2015. Looking at most of the numbers for 2016, seems to be about the same. Doesn’t seem like a dead business to me??
Considering that HP-UX is dead now that Itanium is dead, and IBM has switched predominantly to Linux on Power, leaving AIX in the dust, seems Solaris is the only viable UNIX choice and viable alternative to Linux. Want to live in a world controlled mostly by one person (Linus Torvalds) and Microsoft (Windows)? Not me. Monopolies are never a good thing for driving innovation.
And finally, during Oracle OpenWorld, the Solaris execs discussed the Solaris roadmap till 2019 and highlighted that the next major release of Solaris (whether its 11.4 or 12.0) has over 1400 features/capabilities. I wouldn't call that a dying OS, nor anywhere close to dead. Sounds like Oracle is trying to determine what to call the next release. Always complicated coming out with a major new release version as it automatically requires ISVs to re-certify/test/validate and therefore delays support and therefore revenue. We shall see soon hopefully what this is really about. I'm positive on the outcome.
Source is of course Oracle!!! You think people would make this up? Rumors start for a reason!