Oracle Kills Virtual Iron 189
rhathar writes in with news that Oracle is killing off the products of Virtual Iron, a month after purchasing the company. Reports say that all but 10 to 15 staff were let go. The Reg article speculates that Oracle bought VI for its technology and considers its customers and partners expendable. When the Sun purchase finalizes, Oracle will be in possession of three separate virtualization technologies all based on Xen. "In a letter to Virtual Iron's sales partners, Oracle says it 'will suspend development of existing Virtual Iron products and will suspend delivery of orders to new customers.' One partner said, 'So basically, anyone that built their hosting infrastructure on VI... is now totally in the s–.'"
Yet another IT company gets to live my dream! (Score:5, Interesting)
I would so love to be Virtual Iron, or anyone who got bought out like that. Geez, they buy me out, then tell me, that, I really am not allowed to work on it any more and can just take off for a few years, here's your millions of dollars.
Yeah... SWEET!
Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream! (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah yeah. Great for the 2 or 3 guys on the top. Everyone else gets fucked though.
Even if you have a small equity stake in a company that gets bought, the guys at the top will always cheat you out your share. Saw it happen many times during the first dot com bubble.
What usually happens is the original owners have a handful of class A shares, and everyone else has class B shares. When the buyout comes around, the owners create and issue a billion (or so) class B shares, and dilute everyone else's interest. OR they simply vote with their (super voting power) class A shares and force everyone to sell the class B shares back at a reduced rate. Or they just sell the assets of the company, and not the company itself... then give themselves huge "bonuses" for making the sale.
Oracle is not IBM. (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, the analysts were wrong. Without warning, Oracle just abruptly terminated a product line on which its customers may have built their entire information-technology infrastructure. This kind of approach to customer service is not how IBM treats its customers.
Look at how IBM handled the sunsetting of OS/2 [ibm.com]. IBM issued a warning long in advance of ceasing sales and distribution of the product. Then, after the termination date, IBM continues to sell service contracts to support the product if a customer continues to need support.
Hmmm. Maybe the time has come to short my Oracle stock.
Don't forget VirtualBox (Score:5, Interesting)
Though probably not for data center use, VirtualBox would add a fourth virtualization technology to their list. I'm more interested to see what they do with VirtualBox than what they do with all their overlapping Xen offerings.
Re:Another reason why VMWare is the... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Don't forget VirtualBox (Score:4, Interesting)
VirtualBox is really for the desktop... or developing VMs for the enterprise, which is where I hope they go with it. I really like VirtualBox. It's free, does everything I need it to do and has replaced my use of VMWare Workstation nicely. If VMWare Workstation were free, I'd switch back.
Re:Purpose of open software (Score:4, Interesting)
It's also a good example of why being a company "likely to be around for a while" isn't worth a damn. Mergers and buy-outs happen, to small companies and large, and it renders all those nice platitudes as to why commercial products are so much "safer" to go with into meaningless drivel.
Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Yet another IT company gets to live my dream! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Another reason why VMWare is the... (Score:1, Interesting)
Are you smoking crack?
Have you seen XenCenter?
I have a pool of 80 Xen Servers, 900 guests, using xencenter to administer the lot, from anywhere.
What happens when your single management server goes down, and you need to make urgent modifications?
In testing, We have found Xen 25% faster than Vmware. same hardware, same taskloads.
I give vmware 5 years. Max.