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And what I found was a big ball of crap.  I tried very hard to simply avoid the whole thing; but I was told by someone higher than me that “you ARE going”.. so a colleague and I drove to the Dearborn Hyatt with probably about 100-150 other people to get the usual song and dance.  Maybe I’m just a super savant (ha, not likely as I’d have won the lottery a long time a go), but I knew the pitch and lack of details/commitment ahead of time.  You get an exec in front of you in these things, they are just like a politician and will not commit to anything.  

I was also told to go ahead and ask the tough questions (like I was already going too), I knew they weren’t going to be answered but you have to take the opportunities that are meaningful to your business when you get the chance.

So I asked the exec responsible for the HW (server & storage), “the HDS storage OEM deal is up and reports are that you aren’t renewing it… what is your plan to fill or not fill that spot?”  Response was “The contract runs through the end of the month, expect some more details coming out around then”.   No more, no less, no we’ve got some real exciting news coming out so be ready… pure blah of nothingness.  Didn’t even try to get anybody there excited.

The virtualization guy was there and speaking, thought hey maybe I could get some nugget of information out of the expected doublespeak that he will blather.  My question “there has to be an obvious push from customers to use oracle products on non-oracle virtualization products, is oracle going to take a stance on this sometime and actually give an answer”.   His response was “I’m the virtualization guy, those would have to be answered by the product guys, but I’m sure they are looking at market pressure”  Seriously?  The guy standing up in front of us representing Oracle/Sun virtualization couldn’t bother to know their product virtualization plans, or even a hint of anything?

I don’t know why the lack of answers annoy me so much, it’s not like I was expecting some actual answers… but generally I can get something, inferred from either a throw away sentence or lack of some detail… but this nothing, it’s like they had been coached by all of the political speachmasters of yore.   There were a number of people sitting at my table saying “I’m surprised I was expecting them to give some answers on things, is Solaris dead/alive, Java, Sparc… no answers only hands being waved in our faces”.

My colleague did get an answer on one item (which I now dislike him for… how dare he get an actual answer; but I believe the presenter was an engineer rather than an exec), Solaris is no longer going to be free, to get an RTU license for it you have to get it via a support contract or with Sun/Oracle hardware.  If you want a free pretty much Solaris OS, OpenSolaris will be an option for you.  The presenter used the pitch that OpenSolaris will be used for more cutting edge future things that after they’ve had time to become stable will be put into the Solaris line.  So like RedHat with Fedora they are going to be pushing OpenSolaris to you on it’s “freeness”and at the same time disparaging it’s lack stability.

My really big takeaway from all this was the deafening lack of general purpose use statements.  As I predicted last year, Oracle/Sun wants to rule the entire platform top to bottom from management, servers storage, app & virtulization tiers.   There was no talk of interoperability, only *their* solution, and it really was the full-on solution pitch, only by integrating all these buzzwords together can we provide you something fast, we couldn’t possibly allow you to turn on that feature if you aren’t using our entire solution (looking at you Oracle Exagrid).  You shouldn’t be using your existing stuff and adding ours into your capacity you should only buy our stuff.  To be crude Ellison has the lowest hanging fruit in in the IT industry, and he has the striking arrogance to believe that customers are going to be jumping at this in large numbers.  I thought we were moving away from the stove-pipe mentality the new Oracle/Sun is all that and more.  I expect limited pickup on this idea (sure there will a quantity of customers that go there), and I feel that after a short while after seeing the uptick be less then expected; Ellison will start to force the issue and restrict certain features to their “solutions” not from a technical perspective but to force Oracle/Sun sales (look at the whole virtualization support method he’s used).  Let’s face it, he has the DB people want to use, and from past actions I have no doubt that he will force people into his stovepipe solutions.