Is Oracle doing well? Ten years ago I thought they were going to suffer as Open Source projects got better and better. That has not happened, or at least, that didn't happen nearly as fast as I thought it would.
Oracle faces intense competition from Microsoft, and also from Open Source. The fact that Oracle has continued forward, seemingly unharmed, has so far struck me as something like a magic act.
Are these layoffs a sign of Oracle in long term decay? Or is this merely typical corporate reorganization that any large company goes through every few years?
For me Oracle has gone into the arena of companies like IBM and CA, where they pretty much only deal in enterprise IT scenarios and have no interest in small/end-user computing. Those companies can continue to make money on support and upgrades for a really long time as the pace of IT change in core enterprise systems is glacial.
Personally I think this kind of high-end only strategy is a really bad idea, as it cuts off your supply of new people who know about your technology and are developing new software for your platforms. I always thought it was a big reason why Linux did so well against proprietary Unix systems like HPUX, Solaris, AIX etc, and in turn why they did well against even more closed-off systems like mainframe products.
When it's hard for people to learn to use your product, due to expensive hardware and licensing fees and complex install processes, fewer people do it, which directly leads to increased costs to hire people in that arena. Compare that to Windows/Linux admins who can easily learn their craft on a cheap/free software and cheap hardware.
Microsoft is a good example of a company who generally gets that problem despite playing in the enterprise space. You can get 180-day licenses and VM images for most of their products for free (completely fine for training), and there's a load of cheap/free training materials.
The Enterprise ONLY strategy worked really well for Oracle (and other in this segment) for decades - Cloud certainly changed this forever, as it brings prices down and introduces more flexibility for the customer.
It was only in 2014 that they started to feel the pinch as it relates to numbers (they knew it was coming long time ago - e.g., hence HANA for SAP and massive investments by Ellison into NetSuite) - over last six months things have accelerated to the point where they will have to make drastic cuts very quickly. So, the floor is dropping so fast all of them (large enterprise software players) are panicking...
For example, look what we had at the same Oracle board, 11 months ago, it's a summary of Trip Chowdhry's (Industry analyst) predictions on how 2016 will play out - he was almost spot on: https://www.thelayoff.com/t/FFbUNu9
This trend will only accelerate in 2017 and it will take some major realignment effort for the companies at issue to survive. I'd give it up to 18 months for things to play out and I believe that we'll see a massive wave of mergers and large scale layoffs.
It seems to me that Microsoft was Oracle of the present and it successfully transitioned itself to Microsoft that has embraced OSS and a better strategy to compete with others.
Oracle is nowdays the Microsoft of the past. They can't seem to find a way to compete.
It's the admission that the fullstack strategy has mostly failed, because they were too slow with it and by the time they got it to market, the landscape had irreparably changed. Solaris is basically legacy at this point, Exa machines don't sell enough, and anyway the company now wants to be a sort of "enterprise PaaS/SaaS provider", so the hardware side will keep getting cut. Tbh, this was on the cards for a while, in particular the Solaris bit - Linux now rules the datacentre, anything else is a hobby project.
All they're doing is starting to actually enforce the rules that always existed around the commercial features. As most people I guess don't use them and you have to pass a special command line flag to unlock those features anyway (so you can't really use them by accident), I don't think it'll change much.
It is, yes, but there's been a steady outward movement of Oracle engineers to other companies. Red Hat picked up one of their top performance engineers to work on Shenandoah and Twitter picked up the compiler engineer who was leading their AOT efforts.
Additionally, so many companies depend on Java (including Oracle!) that if they suddenly laid off the entire developer workforce I suspect they'd all be hoovered up by other companies and put right back on their old duties, just in different offices.
Also it seems a lot of the JVM engineers are based in Russia, where presumably their costs are not that high.
Not at the same scale of Java, but I have seen lots of companies across my home country to bet their business in xBase (namely Clipper and FoxPro) and Turbo Pascal/Delphi in the 80 and 90's.
We all know how critical to the daily business those languages have become.
Actually it does not make any sense.Solaris and the ecosystem was infinitely superior to anything out there (note: was). Oracle slowly killed it over time and did not embrace the change (like Microsoft did).
If you have a really strong platform, technical superiority and you employ one of the best people in the world you must be in a deep shit if you screw up that much.
Oracle positioned itself as an "Apple of enterprise software and services" but in a globalized world and the world of constant cost savings and outsourcing how can you justify buying a solution that only brings you revenue indirectly ? That's non sense.
You can't only target fortune 100/500. You need to attract masses.
Solaris was awesome. Sparc was awesome. But these are the things of the past. They should have attracted millions of Java developers to buy into their ecosystem. But they threw it away.
They could have marketed Solaris as a better Linux and could have directly compete with AWS. They just needed to make Solaris bigger and popular. It was not that hard. They had better tech (eg zones vs docker) ages ago but they all threw it away.
"If you have a really strong platform, technical superiority and you employ one of the best people in the world you must be in a deep shit if you screw up that much."
Well, by that line of reasoning, all the mistakes belong to Sun MicroSystems, not Oracle. And you actually make the case for what Oracle is doing -- trying to be the opposite of Sun.
Sun failed to make money. They had great products but failed to make money out of them.
Oracle did great for some time (resurrected SPARC and Solaris) but they also made a lot of the great people leave (Nexenta, Joyent etc etc).
Sun commoditized hardware and operating systems with "write once run anywhere". Then they commoditized software with free stuff, such as OpenOffice, VirtualBox, etc. Then the music stopped and, having no consulting operation to speak of, they had nowhere to sit.
How was Solaris or SPARC awesome? If they were so awesome why are basically all modern companies that use lots of compute, your Googles and Facebooks and Amazons and whathaveyous, ALL based on Linux/x86? Even after Solaris went open source?
Solaris did not go open source. Oracle killed open source Solaris long time ago.
Google,Facebook and Amazon were big from the start and needed specific hardware and software combo for their use cases.
Solaris used to host 99% of the internet then Linux took off and it was cheaper and just good enough. Oracle failed to catch up and lure developers and companies in. Basically what Oracle did was that it "refused" (meaning poor service and support even if you paid a lot) to work with non-fortune 500 companies. It's still being used in most of your banks,insurance companies and large corporations all around the world. Oracle considered itself better than others and failed miserably to deliver.
Also a lot of really neat futures that got into Linux were built on top of the giants from Solaris communities. It's really a shame to lose all of this.
Solaris _absolutely_ "went" open source in the form of OpenSolaris. Oracle re-closed it, but the main line of innovation in that line of operating systems (arguably all operating systems) is still open source in the form of Illumos.
The past is filled with superior technology that died due to non-technical reasons.
1) Amiga (Seriously 7 years ahead of everyone else)
2) BeOS (Unless you used it and saw it you still don't understand why it was awesome)
3) Digital Alpha Chips (I had a soft spot for old VAX what can I say)
4) SPARC was awesome but you have to remember it was awesome over Windows, Apple Server (Um anything was better then that spawn of Satan) and the various other UNIX systems.
Looks like lots of trouble in the whole ERP space. SAP isn't seeing people moving to HANA. Panaya is struggling. And Oracle EBS market share is declining.
I don't know if all ERP software is like what I've seen but what I've seen is a hot mess.
If your company is ever looking to move to the ERP space from a homegrown legacy system like we did, don't buy Infor. I'd rather deal with greenscreens for the next twenty years of my life than have to deal with Infor products and support for one more year. And I used to hate old, tired Big Iron.
Don't know anything about Infor but these are huge complex systems that people don't want to change because there is a huge risk of changes. So now they are falling behind, running up huge amounts of technical debt, and staying on old systems. I know with SAP most people have never heard of HANA and most of the companies that migrated did so because they were on very very old versions. Oracle EBS is pushing this migration to the cloud that is making a bit of traction with SMBs but not going anywhere in the enterprise and changes are difficult.
Sun was losing money so they had to sell. It was a screwed up business that had a lot of great open source software being built.
Hardware is hard. My outsiders prospective is that Sun tried hard to make money at it by giving away the software. They failed.
Red Hat seems to do this better, they open source their software and charge for support. I think Sun would be here today if they operated more like Red Hat and offered a Nexenta style product with a commercial license and support than trying to do hardware.
they capitalized on Solaris (read SunOS) for many years, making sure the online documentation is obtuse and the best option for companies is to buy pricey support contracts.
or send their DevOps to training courses, at a premium. They really made sure their online community/footprint was kept to a minimum - googlging issues and errors often led nowhere and left no choice but to call upon the support gods who'd login and fix things. the support folk were nice people - but it left you non the wiser about your issue.
They also are capitalizing on Java using premium licensing if you're building with Oracle Java for the enterprise and planning to make money from it.
my source is my own experience working with Solaris, which beyond ZFS and OracleDB, has very few things going for it - it made me feel like a bad Sysadmin, really. maybe i was, maybe it is a better OS than my experience taught me.
now they've decided to go all cloud, and are killing Solaris. Java will probably still continue being developed.
They bought it for the high-end enterprise use, which is the part that made money. They screwed up the open-source/consumer-facing parts, but those never made any money for Sun in the first place.
it looks like the ESA is doing development on OpenSPARC, the idea is that you need doubles for accurate space computations ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEON )
Oracle faces intense competition from Microsoft, and also from Open Source. The fact that Oracle has continued forward, seemingly unharmed, has so far struck me as something like a magic act.
Are these layoffs a sign of Oracle in long term decay? Or is this merely typical corporate reorganization that any large company goes through every few years?