No reason given for Fowler's exit, no new exec named and no sign of continuous delivery
By Chris Williams and Simon Sharwood 2 Aug 2017 at 23:08
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/02/oracle_john_fowler_bails/
Oracle has revealed that John Fowler, a Sun veteran who stayed to serve as Oracle's executive veep for systems, has left the company.
An SEC filing [PDF] dated July 27, 2017 says “John F Fowler resigned his position as Executive Vice President, Systems effective as of August 2, 2017.” No reason is offered for Fowler's departure.
According to Oracle's biography for Fowler, Fowler had responsibility “for the delivery of all of Oracle's systems products, including SPARC and x86-based servers, Oracle Solaris, networking, and disk and tape storage products.”
Oracle's hardware sales were $4.15bn for the 12 months to June, but that is declining and the division now brings in less cash than the cloud. Which may be why the database giant recently decided its FS1 storage array won't be sold to customers, and instead will be kept alive to form part of Oracle's cloud.
Writing is on the wall. Whether you believe it or not Oracle is out of the hardware / engineered systems business. What little remains of anything hardware or engineered systems related will be in the cloud or not exist at all. Sign of the times.
The hard transition is on the backs of the employees. For the foreseeable future Oracle's strategy is not selling software or hardware, its selling cloud. Whether or not cloud will sell with minimal investment remains to be seen. For anyone under Fowler, he is leading by example. You should follow his lead.