Here is the official announcement. The Register reports are here and here. This seems to be more than just the few slides I talked about a month or so ago. Quite a few companies are affected by that. The Register talks about the obvious ones. Smaller ones (Fujitsu, Rackable etc.) might get slammed. However, some big ones are out there, that we haven’t heard of. The question is: where is Microsoft?
All this infrastructure is nice, but it still is only infrastructure – a means to run applications. None of the application providers endorsed this venture yet. SAP or Symantec might, but it is hard to see Microsoft and especially Oracle to really appreciate this VCE (or EVC as The Register calls it). Oracle/Sun – it needs to happen sooner than later – will certainly make a point about the fact that it is about the apps.
BOT (build, operate, transfer) – as Chuck alludes is what this venture should deliver. They signed up a couple of big partners (mostly integrators and outsourcers). Many of those need a partnership like this, since IBM and HP are full systems providers and Dell tries to become one (They bought Perot Systems remember?).
Point here is that we know where HP, IBM stands, where Dell wants to be. We can assume, what Oracle/SUN think they should be. SAP happily runs on everything – they may wish they could run without a database., though. But where is Microsoft?
I would like to know…
Ooh I forgot one more name NetApp where will they go?
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