Thursday, January 28, 2010

Peace, love, and the IBM System 360s (Forrester: The Forrester Blog For Application Development & Program Management Professionals Blog)

A timely Oracle/Sun summary from John Rymer; read the full post. My $.02: Larry Ellison evidently wants Oracle to become the Apple of the data center – an end-to-end provider of solutions that “just work;” tbd if that’s what enterprise IT customers (and IT professional services companies, which, due to outsourcing and long-term services contracts, are often the ultimate decision-makers for enterprise IT organizations these days) actually want.

"Our vision for 2010 is the same as IBM's for the year 1960." So said Oracle's Larry Ellison from the stage at today's event to celebrate his company's acquisition of Sun Microsystems. With Sun in hand, Oracle will now take us back to the simple virtues of mainframes 50 years ago. Updated, these virtues are:

  • Simple deployment. Rather than integrate and configure a collection of software products on a server, customers install a purpose-built box with all the software installed, integrated, and configured.
  • Simple support. Rather than weave through the pointing fingers of multiple vendors, customers turn to just one to obtain support for their systems.
  • Simple reliability and performance. Because the vendor owns all of the elements in the hardware-software stack, it can "engineer-in" reliability and performance, as IBM did with the System 360.

Forrester: The Forrester Blog For Application Development & Program Management Professionals Blog

1 comment:

Noah said...

> "Our vision for 2010 is the
> same as IBM's for the
> year 1960." [...] Oracle
> will now take us back to
> the simple virtues of
> mainframes 50 years ago.
> Updated, these virtues are:

> * Simple deployment.
> Rather than integrate and
> configure a collection of
> software products on a
> server, customers install
> a purpose-built box with
> all the software
> installed, integrated,
> and configured.

So, the plan is to use JCL?