Mafeking

Oracle Acquisition of Sun Makes Perfect Sense

Sun has three broad business areas: Hardware - servers and chips, software - Java and associated frameworks and Services - a reasonable professional services outfit.

Oracle can improve the efficiency and profitability of the Sun services organization and move their (Oracles) more aggressive and costly professional services people into that space. There is money to be made in this area.

But the other two areas are more problematic.

In hardware Sun is losing market share to the increasing power of the mulit-processor Intel and AMD chip sets. Certainly the Sun Sparc and n-way architecture has greater performance, but this performance is only required in very demanding areas. Oracle has bought a declining business in this area that is likely to go head to head with HP's servers (not cooperate with HP). I am not sure Gardner is correct in his assessment here.

Sun's software offerings are another story. Sun invented (Gosling, et. al.) Java, Java libraries and Java frameworks that created almost a revolution in the software industry by improving software portability and robustness. But has never been able to truly monetize the Java story. I suspect the Sun software unit is not profitable. The forces of Open Source Java have just been too strong.

So Sun's software business is also a story of declining profits.

In the final analysis I think Ellison has bought Sun for their customer base and the synergies and penetration that Oracle can achieve into the Sun accounts and customers. Oracle is not going to make a lot of profit from Sun's hardware and software.

Will Intel's New Processor Be a Game-Changer?

The performance of the i7 quad processors overlap those of the more familiar Core 2 Quad with performance only better at the high end of the Nehalem range.

The problem is the software. It is very difficult to write software that takes advantage of multiple processors on a single chip. Very little truly multi-threaded software currently exists that can benefit from the newer chips.

As it happens I am writing this on a desktop with an i7 processor - just another good performance desktop.

Will the Nehalem series have good performance: yes.

Will it be a game changer: hello no. Game changes await the smart researchers who can simplify multi-process multi-threaded software.

Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News

Perhaps the funniest moment of the whole financial debacle so far was Barney Frank's demand that those responsible for the mess should be charged and jailed.