Posts by danolds

Oracle and Sun: First takes

Not installation OR integration services

What I was trying to get to with the services angle, and perhaps didn't do a great job of, is the idea that Oracle would move upmarket with more business oriented services. By this, I'm talking about advising the business side of the organization about how to wring more money out of their customers by database/app enabled cross selling, for example. As a vendor, when you can get into the heads of business side management, the deals get bigger, approvals come easier, and margins are higher than when you engage by simply responding to RFP's.

On the hardware side, IBM plays this game with very well with their PWC guys and other business consultants. In retail, for example, they do a lot of basic research into consumer behavior and use the data as conversation starters with customers. This conversation can then be extended to 'how can you, Mr. Customer, take advantage of this trend/condition/frustration?'.

From there it moves into a formal consulting engagement which identifies problems and, hopefully, puts a credible dollar figure on the value of the proposed solution. The hardware/software/integration spending is just part of the larger project and often isn't negotiated as fiercely as a straight IT procurement. If there is some negotiation, the vendor can discount whatever part of the deal is bothering the customer, while making up the margin on other parts.

I think that these types of services are going to become more important over time as competition increases and the margins on deals become even skinnier. IBM has the most strength in this area, HP is adding their own capabilities through their purchase of EDS (and eventual morphing it into different areas), and I think Dell's Perot buy was in large part to get the capability to do these types of deals. Oracle has a lot of vertical industry expertise, which will serve them well here, and I would expect them to exploit it.

And, um, yeah, we listened to the meeting and we don't typically flip coins on this stuff. We have a massive array of Magic 8 Balls that we use to form the basis of our research.

SC09: Mineral oil computing - The coming wave?

Horse laxative?

I wish I'd have known about the horse laxative angle when I was writing the story - I would have definitely included it in the text and maybe even added some video of a horse to drive the point home. As an IT analyst and tech industry consultant, I would strongly advise staying away from any messaging that explicitly mentions "horse laxative"...

HP shows smallest pod in the world, talks HPC

Link that works

The embedded link to the exhaustive set of cubit/palm conversions doesn't work in the article above. If I know anything about Reg readers, I know that there will be folks that want to know if my Roman cubit calculations are correct or will also want to convert into Persian cubits, Greek cubits, or Salmis cubits. Here's the link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubit#Other_important_cubits

Of NVIDIA and hybrid computing

Wrong cat?

Wrong sort of cat? What should I have used? But you may have a point...I did seem to draw some disapproving looks from some of the folks at the show while I did my testing. I thought it might have been due to my using a freebie Microsoft bag to hold my gear, but maybe it was because of the cat....

Yep, lots of hype, but....

...GPUs just make too much economic sense. They crunch more numbers at a much lower cost than anything else. A couple of years ago, I might well have agreed with you that GPUs are over-hyped solutions that might not have any impact. But now, mainly because of the formation of a GPU ecosystem (programming language, etc.) and support from other vendors, I think that GPUs are becoming mainstream and that we'll see more of it in coming months.

Hell, I'm even looking to join the crowd. For my Reg duties, I recorded a bunch of these video interviews - like the one with NVIDIA. I have a fairly big system in my office (two socket Barcelona, 8 GB memory, 10k RPM disk, with 2x NVIDIA video cards to drive multiple monitors). Even with this amount of brawn, I was still seeing longer than anticipated render times for these videos with Premiere Elements. I realized that my vid cards are CUDA enabled and decided to investigate the possibility of using them as render engines. Long story short, I found that it's not quite there yet - I'd need to upgrade my video editing SW (hundreds of dollars more) and do some technical work on the innards of my o/s....but, if I did that, I could cut my render times by a factor of 10. While this is a bridge too far for me now, I'm thinking that this capability will become embedded in new app and o/s versions in the future...

Cell phone supercomputing, anyone?

Ooops, typo in article

For the guys that made reference to the phrase "...per website..." in the article, what it should have said was "...per their website..." with the intention being to simply point out that they're charging $100 per box. I suck....