Is it just me or is anyone else shocked by Oracle’s arrogance? The sudden annoucement that they will no longer support the Itanium platform will cause a significant amount of disruption for many large SAP customers. I am really surprised that no one has blogged about this so I figured I would post this quick rant to stimulate conversation regarding this.
In this case – I understood that all existing ORACLE stuff will work with itanium, but going forward they won’t. But then what is the future plan on itanium from intel itself?
Enterprise vendors drop or add support for various architectures in new product versions all the time (check the SAP PAM at http://service.sap.com/pam for many many examples). Customers generally adjust, which can be a pain, but it can usually be worked into normal upgrade/retirement cycles.
Can you explain why this particular move is going to cause such unusual disruption?
And Intel hasn’t been talking about the Itanium for quite some time. I know that we get regular technology briefings from Intel, and they haven’t mentioned Itanium in their briefings in a few years.
In all, I think the signs have been there for quite some time.
In the end though, I think history has proven that it is not beyond Oracle to make decisions that offend many, customers and partners alike. It is unfortunate, but reality often bites.
Some products (both hardware and software) are successful, some are not. Oracle saw that it was not selling much on the platform, and doesn’t see the commitment behind it from Intel, so decided to discontinue it. At least, that’s the way I’m understanding the situation.
Not worth screaming about, unless I’m missing something here.
Cheers,
David.
There are likely many more customers using their DB engine than their apps (used be like 70% of their sales or something I thought). So if the announcement is for “apps”, but not the DB, it might not mean anything for the SAP Customers, regardless of their size.
Another aspect of this announcement impacts the SaaS or Cloud Server re-sellers. Imagine you’re Amazon and have a number of systems based on IA used for countless businesses — how do you handle making sure the customers all know — and you can re-invest in your shared hosting landscape to avoid issues in the future.
I see this, much as HP commented, as a move to help force Oracle customers into purchasing SUN HW. (I’d say that even if I wasn’t a former HP employee too).