On Fri, 3 May 2013, Craig Bender wrote:
A few thoughts:
I am curious as to how many of you have actually talked to your Oracle Sales
Rep before "concurring" with these statements? How many of your have based
Oracle's commitment level to the product have actually opened a support case
or posted questions to the Oracle Forums?
I've been in contact three times with Oracle Sales Rep since Oracle
purchased SUN.
1. When they (Oracle USA) called me up in my private home on my vacation
and told me to shut up online (meaning I would stop posting to this list).
2. When their Swedish salespeople came out to my workplace, told me I was
to small a customer for them to consider and at the same time they told me
that to get a hardware support contract for a server I first need a
software support contract (for Solaris or OEL) even if I was gonna run
Ubuntu or RHEL on it. Retroactively also, 5 years back, costed more than
the machine.
3. And lastly, when Oracle Germany called me a couple of months ago, asked
if they could make amends and have a salesrep call me. We set up a time
and everything, he never called. I sat by the phone for 2h waiting.
Oracle does not keep acquired products that they do not believe have a
future. I'd challenge you to compare release timelines from both Sun and
Oracle and see under which flag the product has had more major releases and
more features. If Oracle was not committed to Sun Ray and VDI, it would have
been gone very soon after the acquisition.
I have no doubt that Oracle is commited to Sun Ray and VDI. If they only
cut put the same amount of commitment to Sun Ray and/or being moderately
nice.
Well, that's not exactly true, at least for the firmware change. Oracle is a
business, Sun Ray/VDI are products that it sells. Support/Maintenance help
pay for developing and supporting the product. There's been more than a few
emails on this list from people asking how to get the firmware for free.
There's been more than a few on this list that have enjoyed release after
release, never having paid for support or maintenance.
I do not condone piracy, but you REALLY need to realize that this is a
techlist. We are the SunRay-Users, not the SunRay-license-experts. Some of
us are technicians, discussing how to get things working (a discussion
that would be forbidden with the Oracle "no benchmark without consent from
Oracle" license that they plaster on everything).
Speaking purely for myself (though I'm sure on the behalf of everyone
involved with Sun Ray/VDI), I love that you love our product, but I'm person
just like you. I have a family, like many of you. I have bills to pay, like
all of you. There's a reason why Sun isn't around anymore and it's not
because of irrelevant technology.
We do get that SUN made bad business calls, but again - you are talking
economics (and now even your personal life about your family?!) - on a
TECHLIST!?
So regarding Wyse/Others, do an apple to apples comparison please. Look at
all the software you have to buy, both on the client side (features) and
server side (management of clients) to give you what Sun Ray has built into
it. Be sure to include the maintenance costs. Let me know how many "real
people" you meet involved with the products.
I said some time ago on this list that:
* TCO is higher than a macbook pro for every user.
* Some people REALLY just want SunRay without the VDI (one VM per user).
But doing this on old RedHat or OEL just doesn't cut it, the Linux apps
are on Ubuntu.
I've been waiting for some time to finally say goodbye to this list.
Soon I can (but it IS fun staying for the drama).
We had 40 SunRay2 last summer, we were planning on retiring them. After
overhearing our users complaining we decided do "prepone" our new model,
which was BYOD with a "if you dont have a computer you can borrow a
macbook pro". For a long time we had 4 SunRay users but the rest were very
happy with 5 macbooks they could borrow at any time. Way cheaper and
sound, skype and USB-sticks work too! The rest just do BYOD.
Today we have 2 SunRay servers (still on SUN license, no Oracle license we
run a really old SRSS) - this system has one single user. A secretary that
was retired 2 years ago but comes in once a week to help us out with a
legacy database, she likes it, she's 67 years old. We are talking about
swapping it with a dell machine with old RHEL on it. Or something else, we
haven't decided.
I really like Oracle hardware but the sales reps scare me - A LOT!
-- Alexander
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Alexander Koponen System Administrator
Institut Mittag-Leffler phone direct: +46 8 622 05 75
Auravagen 17 phone itdept: +46 8 622 05 70
SE-182 60 DJURSHOLM [email protected]
SWEDEN http://www.mittag-leffler.se/
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