When I heard last week that Oracle is “losingpatience” with key providers of virtualization technology, Iconfess that my first reaction was something like, “What’s to lose?”
I’ve never thought of patience as Oracle’s defining characteristic,and I say that more as compliment than as critique. The company hasalways struck me as having a pretty clear picture of what it wanted,and as having the resources and the will to build it or buy—on anaggressive timetable—whatever it couldn’t find.
Seeing that phrase made me wonder, though, if “The Year of LosingPatience” might be a well-chosen label for all of 2006 in the IT realm.
- Systems builders like Dell are losing patience with Intel’sleisurely pace of improving performance per watt and are adoptingalternative CPUs from AMD.
- Application developers are losing patience with Microsoft’s glacialprogress toward shipping a delayed and defeatured Vista operating system—with continuing concern andcontroversy about the security improvements that are almost Vista’sonly remaining selling proposition.
- In-house federal government watchdogs are losing patience withexecutive branch agencies and their continuing failure to protect keydata, and are telling them to have improved technology and practices inplace by—ummm—today.
IBM has responded to this climate, making its clocks run faster tomatch its buyers’ demands for more rapid response to new opportunitiesand requirements. Packaged offerings like IBM’s “Grid andGrow” bundles let IT buyers think of themselves as buyers ofbusiness solutions, rather than experimenters and integrators ofbleeding-edge technology.
Apple is doing much the same thing in the consumer space, positioning Macs as readyto come out of the box and do stuff — while PCs, Apple would havebuyers believe, require far more tedious setup and constantmaintenance. IBMis executing well, it seems to me, on its similar strategy in theenterprise space — making better speed along a path that Sun has longsought to define as its own.
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Read the full story on eWEEK.com: Enterprises Want It All and Want It Now
