The End of an Era - Part 1

It’s amazing how many people look at my CV and immediately ask the very same question: “So what about Sun Microsystems?” At least we have the next step defined: Oracle. The only remaining question is what’s next? Firstly as a former Sun employee I too drank the kool-aid. Funny metaphor in that it had the very same net result as the Koresh cult... death. Ultimately Sun’s undoing is due in no small part to that kool-aid. Technology is not a religion. It should never be treated as such.

As the former Director of Marketing for the Sun-Microsoft Collaboration and later as Director of Partner Operating System Marketing (my team and I were responsible for marketing all non-Solaris OS implementations on Sun’s hardware - including Windows, Red Hat, Suse, Umbuntu and VMware) I can tell you from first hand experience that Sun’s problems largely parallel the speed (or lack thereof) in deciding that selling solutions that customers ask for is what they should be doing. It took over two years for the Company to formally OEM VMware’s hypervisor and solutions stack. The Sun channel partners who wanted to sell VMware virtualization on Sun’s opteron-based server hardware usually sold an HP sku. Yes, sell Sun hardware and HP get’s a cut. That’s not a way to run a business! Some may even find it shocking that there was actually an Partner Operating System marketing organization. That, by itself, was progress for Sun. You should know that I reported to the VP of Solaris Marketing. Not an organizational structure designed for success.

So, what happens now? Oracle can quickly become one of the handful of end-to-end IT solutions providers -- along with IBM, HP, Microsoft/Dell, and perhaps Cisco at some point (I’ll blog on that later). Or, Oracle can decide to simply continue to focus on the software footprint and sell, close or spin-off the server and storage hardware parts. If I were a betting man I’d say that Oracle will look to use hardware to create appliances from much of their software stack and attempt to optimize the remaining hardware for the database and applications stack. (Which, by the way, they will fail to accomplish in the same way as everyone else in the commoditized platform business has failed to accomplish this. That after all is what commoditized means: everyone can build -- or have access to -- the same thing.)

Sun Microsystems will ultimately go the same way as DEC... remembered fondly in alumni groups until those too die off.