AKIBIA'S PRACTICAL GUIDE TO ENTERPRISE TECHNOLOGY
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Sun Makes More Changes Amid Uncertainty
As we await the European Union’s ultimate decision on the Oracle acquisition of Sun, a number of questions exist making customers uncertain of buying new Sun products or maintaining existing Sun relationships. With Sun and Oracle unable to give clear answers regarding the acquisition close date, how the server group will be integrated in Oracle and what will happen to Sun’s support team, the outlook is murky. As a result many of the prospects Akibia speaks with are evaluating ways to migrate off of SUN platforms and to more stable server and storage environments. There is much speculation concerning which competitor will benefit the most from this move away from Sun – some say IBM and HP according to this Wall Street Journal update.
Despite Sun facing an already difficult customer environment, they have announced they will further test customer loyalty and patience by ending their software-only support contract discount programs with resellers. This means companies running Sun hardware that are interested in purchasing Sun software-only support contracts will need to purchase these directly through the Sun website. Akibia has encouraged customers who rely on Akibia for hardware support but Sun for some software support to renegotiate software contracts with Sun resellers before December 12, 2009 to ensure competitive pricing discounts.
While this is not a major disruption to those running Sun environments today, it is another example of how Sun does not understand the customer’s need for ease of use, flexibility and transparency of communication.
