This morning whilst reading the FT and sipping my coffee I started reading about the dramatic increase in server sales that the market is currently experiencing. Everyone from IBM and HP through to AMD and Intel have seen sales rise dramatically.
It is as they say "a perfect storm", as budgets are loosened after a year of belt tightening, old hardware and software is reaching a point where it has to be upgraded, and the new server technologies pretty much guarantee they pay for themselves in a matter of months. They pay for themselves due the spectacular rise in computing power they deliver over previous generations, and simultaneously a spectacular drop in power consumption.
This all took me back to project I was involved in whilst at Wipro. To this day I have no idea why but I somehow became the link man between Wipro and Sun Microsystems, to partner on a Solaris 10 initiative. It was slam dunk financially, as Solaris 10 was open source, as even if one only got service revenue and ran Solaris 10 on non Sun hardware (HP for example) the cost savings were so huge compared to say Solaris 8 or pretty much any other flavor of Unix, we were doing well.
The problem was we did not do well - the Sun brand at that time was so tarnished, so connected with failure that it was like climbing a mountain even to get a meeting with some clients to discuss the potential. Sun had great people, and some awesome technology, we had a clear cut business case - but no means to spark a conversation, due to perceptions around the brand and the potential future of Sun.
It's likely (or at least it should be) that Oracle is now reaping the benefits of all Suns hard work and expertise. Not just because of an improved economy, but because people feel secure with Oracle. Its the same with IBM and Microsoft and that is to some extent why they dominate the IT world, sentiment and perception carrying more weight in buying decisions than we realize.
Something of a ramble as always, but that's the point of a personal blog - but reading the FT really did bring back some memories.
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