Will Oracle kill off SPARC?

By | October 12, 2010

Oracle’s been busy re-shaping their world, and the world of their acquired business units.

Phillip Jaenke (@RootWyrm on Twitter) has a lot of opinions, this time around he’s pieced together some compelling evidence that argues that Oracle doesn’t intend on continuing development (or development that matters, anyhow) on the SPARC platform.

http://rootwyrm.us.to/2010/10/sparc-the-future-that-wasnt-and-isnt/

What bothers me as much as anything is how much uncertainty there is in dealing with ~anything~ that touches the Oracle acquisition-verse.  Whether it’s the future of OpenSolaris (since clarified), or the future of SPARC, end users (and partners such as Fujitsu) seem to be in the dark about everything on the roadmap.

Uncertainty should be driving IT decision makers to validate and consider alternate solutions to some of products coming from Oracle, given the uncertainty of the roadmap for anything other than their flagship database product. If you are an Oracle shop, you probably can’t just ditch Oracle without a lot of pain, but it’s best to be prepared. Given that HP, IBM and others will go out of their way to help you migrate to their hardware and software platforms, it’s worth an investigation, anyhow.

Full disclosure: My employer has announced OEM relationships with HP and IBM. I’m speaking as an individual in this case, as is always the case with my commentary on this site.

One thought on “Will Oracle kill off SPARC?

  1. Pingback: Bill Plein

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