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HP Integrity and Oracle Support

jacob.van-ewyk| March 29, 2011
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A week ago, Oracle surprised HP and over a hundred thousand joint customers by announcing that they were no longer going to develop Oracle products for Itanium processors - essentially HP Integrity servers. While I've spent most of the last 10 days learning how to burp and diaper my baby girl, I have followed the news with interest and concern.

 

While lots of articles have been written (and I don't want to re-cover them here), I do want to note a few things.

  • While the industry trend is definitely towards industry standard computing and cloud computing, workload optimized systems are a long way from dead. While the trend has been away from mainframe for decades, there are still lots of systems being shipped. Even if the UNIX market isn't growing, it is still mostly flat (with declines during poor economic cycles) and still just a little smaller from a revenue perspective than the entire x86 market.
  • Among the big three UNIX vendors, HP is #2 market share by revenue. It is bigger than Solaris. With over a hundred thousand joint Oracle and HP customers, there are a whole lot of Oracle instances on HP Integrity servers. While IBM AIX has #1 UNIX market share, there is also a lot of DB2 running on AIX. This at least makes you wonder if Power support may be next. And what about Windows, SUSE Linux, etc?
  • When things change in the UNIX market, HP has given customers years of notice, and lots of support. For instance, the current version of HP-UX 11i v3 will have support at least until 2020 [PDF].

 

If you are interested, HP's official response is available on the Customers First site.  If you are an Oracle customer, and are concerned because you either use HP Integrity servers or are concerned that your systems could be next, feel free to express your concern to your Oracle rep or email Oracle at gcp-customerfeedback_us@oracle.com. I guess, at the end of the day, the biggest question for customers is what type of company they want to do business with.

 

Jacob Van Ewyk

Tags: HP-UX 11i v3| Itanium| Oracle| support
Labels: HP Integrity| Itanium| oracle| server| UNIX| x86
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Comments
Michael St-Jean(anon) | ‎04-01-2011 01:49 PM
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Many of Larry Ellison's announcements are meant to disrupt the market to Oracle's gain. We saw that back when they started their acquisition frenzy beginning with PeopleSoft. Larry told everyone his plan was to buy PeopleSoft and kill the product and move all the customers over to E-Business suite.

 

That strategy made no business sense whatsoever, but what it did was disrupt the market. Some customers halted their purchase decisions, the analysts started swarming around PeopleSoft, the stock dropped, and Larry was able to negotiate a lower price for his acquisition. It didn't take long before he turned 180 degrees and announced unlimited application support for the product, as well as the merged JD Edwards applications, and announced a long reaching roadmap.

 

At OOW last year, Larry mentioned a few times that his new strategy was to build a business model similar to the IBM model of the late 80's and early 90's, offering customers everything they need under one roof. Basically, he wants to lock everyone in to Oracle so he has total control of the customer spend. Well, historically, that worked for IBM for a little while, but then back in the early 90's, customers revolted. IBM had to change course, restructure, and become an open systems player, or risk losing everything.

 

So, taking a step back, we have to ask ourselves, what is Larry's strategy with the announcement of halting development for the Itanium chip? As we watch Sun market share steadily drop quarter after quarter, and while HP maintains the #1 vendor position with Oracle, it seems obvious that Larry is once again trying to disrupt the market. The question is whether we, as a community of customers, partners, and vendors will allow this announcement to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, or band together and do something about it.

 

Back when Larry announced that he was going to kill PeopleSoft, customers around the world banded together. Sure, some folks got scared, they put projects and purchases on hold, and their businesses suffered because of it. Others decided to move forward with their project plans and formed a community to speak out against their outrage. I remember walking through the PeopleSoft campus one day with yellow ribbons of solidarity tied on every tree.

 

So today, I have no doubt that Larry's announcement may have put some projects on hold. Some customers may have even made the decision to go with an inferior Sun platform, just so they can ensure support... which, by the way, is not a sure thing either. The rest of us have to band together. Let's form a community, and a battle cry to stop the insanity. For all his talk, Larry Ellison is far from being stupid. When customers band together and tell him what they want, or they will start looking elsewhere, Larry listens.

 

Larry may have disrupted the market, once again, with his impetuous announcements. The question is whether we will allow him to continue disrupting the market, or if we will band together, continue with our projects on Itanium as planned, and work with our Oracle representatives, executives, and partners to drive home the message... Itanium is alive and well, and Oracle needs to change course, or they will lose a lot of customers.

 

-- Michael St-Jean is a Solutions Business Manager for HP’s ESSN Marketing organization. His views are solely his own, and do not reflect the views or opinions of Hewlett-Packard Company or their affiliates.

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About the Author
  • Kirk Bresniker is the Vice President/Chief Technologist for HP Business Critical Systems where he has technical responsibility for all things Mission Critical, including HP-UX, NonStop and scalable x86 platforms. He joined HP in 1989 after graduating from Santa Clara University and has been an HP Fellow since 2008.
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