Having worked for a very large Oracle customer, I think some of the moves that Oracle are taking are looked on with a lot of suspicion. Declaring something close to war on HP is going to cause massive disruption to many customers as migrating massive enterprise apps and, especially databases, between hardware platforms is a massively expensive and disruptive. Whilst Oracle are continuing to support x64 and Linux, it's notable that they are explicitly not releasing some of the software technology used in the Exadata OEL cluster into their general releases. I was also in receipt of all sorts of FUD from Oracle sales staff over the support for Linux on x64 vs Oracle on SPARC. The reasons are clear - just compare the price of virtually any standard component on a SPARC server versus an x64 one (memory is a good place to start).
That leaves customers with the distinct (and not unreasonable) impression that Oracle are hell-bent on locking in customers for the entire hardware and software stack. Once a customer finds themselves in this position, costs start ratcheting up and the price of extricating yourself is huge. The industry has seen this before, and new projects will be put onto more cost-effective platforms. That's what killed DEC when they over-priced VAX and what drove almost all new applications off of IBM mainframes.
Also, I find El Register's lionising of the T4. Unfortunately Oracle have declined to publish the sort of low level benchmarks that allow customer's to work out if these are practical alternatives to M series machines. There are a bunch of carefully selected application benchmarks which tell you very little save a very strong suspicion that they've been chosen because they fit the heavily threaded multi-threaded nature of the T4. However, many large corporations will have had some apps which perform disastrously on T series due to the very slow single thread performance.
The advice for anybody looking at large scale future projects is to be very wary about lock-ins to proprietary architectures. Given that, I expect that Oracle will continue to lose ground.
Register
Squeezing the customer...
Having worked for a very large Oracle customer, I think some of the moves that Oracle are taking are looked on with a lot of suspicion. Declaring something close to war on HP is going to cause massive disruption to many customers as migrating massive enterprise apps and, especially databases, between hardware platforms is a massively expensive and disruptive. Whilst Oracle are continuing to support x64 and Linux, it's notable that they are explicitly not releasing some of the software technology used in the Exadata OEL cluster into their general releases. I was also in receipt of all sorts of FUD from Oracle sales staff over the support for Linux on x64 vs Oracle on SPARC. The reasons are clear - just compare the price of virtually any standard component on a SPARC server versus an x64 one (memory is a good place to start).
That leaves customers with the distinct (and not unreasonable) impression that Oracle are hell-bent on locking in customers for the entire hardware and software stack. Once a customer finds themselves in this position, costs start ratcheting up and the price of extricating yourself is huge. The industry has seen this before, and new projects will be put onto more cost-effective platforms. That's what killed DEC when they over-priced VAX and what drove almost all new applications off of IBM mainframes.
Also, I find El Register's lionising of the T4. Unfortunately Oracle have declined to publish the sort of low level benchmarks that allow customer's to work out if these are practical alternatives to M series machines. There are a bunch of carefully selected application benchmarks which tell you very little save a very strong suspicion that they've been chosen because they fit the heavily threaded multi-threaded nature of the T4. However, many large corporations will have had some apps which perform disastrously on T series due to the very slow single thread performance.
The advice for anybody looking at large scale future projects is to be very wary about lock-ins to proprietary architectures. Given that, I expect that Oracle will continue to lose ground.