On a day when President Obama acknowledged he had to think much smaller than the 60s “Great Society” vision of Lyndon Johnson, Larry Ellison actually went the other way and said “Our vision for the year 2010 is the same as IBM's vision for the year 1960”.
So, step one in that vision is to bring the Oracle software maintenance model to Sun hardware. As this transcript from a call with financial analysts shows:
“Renewing and upselling existing hardware support and increasing attach rates, virtually every customer who buys and Oracle product today buys support, that's not the case with Sun. Some customers are not buying support at all. Some customers are getting support from partners. Some customers may be getting the support, but they're not paying for it.”
So, Mr and Mrs. CIO, have you enjoyed dealing with your friendly Oracle salesperson over the last few years as you discuss the “value from 22% maintenance”? Are you ready to double your fun conversations with your salesperson to also include hardware?
If so, cheer for the Oracle “Great Society”
But if you want smaller “government”, ask Oracle how it is moving to technology-as-service, where you pay by the drink, not in annual chunks and massive purchase orders. Ask Oracle, where the savings are it promised from the consolidations of the last few years. Ask Oracle what is so illegal about third party support around its products, when it itself happily offers to support Red Hat products and its Sun services support HP and other products.
As Lyndon Johnson once said “We did not choose to be the guardians of the gate, but there is no one else.”
So mind that gate, or soon you will be begging the Feds (and the EU) to do to Oracle what they did to IBM in the late 60s.
Update: Larry Dignan has Larry Ellison "retro" in 60s garb and hairdo on the ZDNet page
