This is such a perception skewed by Silicon-Valley-Syndrome.<p>This is how the rest of the world works -- I run an import/export business and have to manage logistics. It doesn't matter what industry, it could be crude oil or widgets from China at half a penny a piece. It's my job as CIO to choose an implementation.<p>I'm going to choose SAP or Dynamics (or one of the handful of other ERP's with name recognition) on DB2 or Oracle. I'm going to store my data on EMC dual array filers for HA and pay the tax. Why? Because if I choose node.js and MongoDB to run my 3 warehouses and the system goes down, I'm getting voted out next board meeting. If my SAP R/3 on IBM hardware goes down, they'll do the dance and at least fly some people out to retain their image keeping your job effectively safe.<p>Banks aren't going to move over from z/OS anytime soon. I don't want my dialysis machine to be running on Riak.
First thing I thought when reading the headline was 'so is Oracle'. Glad it's mentioned in the article.<p>AWS is absolutely killing it. Every release cycle, they put out quality products that directly attack Oracle. And, Oracle is in the bad position of having to eat their existing profitable business lines to compete.<p>Now, of course, cloud isn't here yet. There are certainly lots of issues around security, auditing, privacy, data ownership, etc. But, the trend is accelerating. Why? Because the cloud is so much cheaper. Why maintain and manage your own data center and infrastructure for millions of dollars when you can reliably outsource for a fraction?<p>I used to do a lot of work in the utility industry. I remember years ago giving a presentation on the cloud. The audience was passionate that it'd never, ever happen to them. They were extremely protective of their data. But, then I slowly saw it happening anyway. It crept in slowly. The first to go were the lowest risk systems. Then, the next lowest risk systems. Then, the next.<p>The incumbents will hold position for a long time to come, propped up mainly by government spending, hellishly long sales cycles, a corporate aversion to micro products, and FUD. They have plenty of time to catch up. But will they? That's the question. Unless oracle is actively researching new cloud platforms (and I'm guessing they are), they're going to be in pain in 5 years. Corporations that don't move to the cloud will be in a cost disadvantage.<p>On the other hand, serious work needs to be done to overcome the severe limitations of the current cloud. Lots of certification and auditing and risk assessments and SLAs need to happen.
The magic cloud. Good thing it is made of fairy dust rather than commodity servers and network equipment or Dell and Cisco might be around forever providing those things.
I read somewhere that the cloud is just someone's else computer. At least in the business I am working with that would never be allowed so if there is a cloud to be had it will be on premises, which may keep these so-called walking dead lumbering for quite some time.
I was hoping for an informative well-written article. Alas, I was to be disappointed. Ignoring the juvenile profanity and the condescending rhetoric, the author completely misdiagnoses the technology shift that will be the real game changer ... namely, the advances in memory architecture. Whether it's memristors or Xpoint 3D or some other architecture, data storage will be completely turned on its head over the next 10 years. The lumbering giants (who bring in 4 times more in net profit in a single quarter than Pure Storage garnered in its IPO) will have to be nimble in the future, but I wouldn't call them the 'walking dead' just yet.
They're the walking dead because they pursued scale over innovation. Once they had achieved scale, they found themselves with too much momentum to innovate. So because they couldn't innovate, they built an army of consultants to hawk their wares to customers who also valued scale. But that consulting business never really took off because its existence was predicated on a model of dumping obsolete (but "enterprisey"!) hardware/software onto customers already suffering from vendor lock-in. When those customers start to struggle (as they inevitably will, because the tech industry is far from the only one where scale can impede your ability to innovate) the market has moved on to a different place, and the company never kept up. Then you see a death spiral of layoffs and divestitures that destroys 50-90% of shareholder value.<p>Sound familiar? This fate awaits all these companies:<p>- Dell: I don't even know what Dell makes anymore. I guess they sell PCs, servers and consulting services to small businesses that don't know any better. But this market is being eroded by an army of local MSPs and resellers, and it's not a model that benefits from scale.<p>- HP: HP has been a disaster for a while, but they will probably endure since their hardware is generally pretty good and reasonably priced. But servers and printers are not a very high-margin business, and that's caused their leadership to be constantly on the hunt for a newer, higher-margin revenue stream.<p>- EMC: Storage is increasingly distributed, and EMC's centralized storage solutions really are a dinosaur in today's market. They just make the wrong product and never found anything to replace it.<p>- Cisco: By all rights, Cisco shouldn't be on this list given that the Internet still largely runs on their hardware. But they convinced themselves they were a consulting company, and that ran off all their good engineers. Cisco today is a shadow of its former self.
Wtf is this article talking about?<p>Microsoft fucked because they have Windows on 95% of computers?<p>Agh, i'm too exasperated to continue my train of thought. Yes, everybody is fucked because of Facebook and Google and MongoDB.
The irony of this is that all of the "cloud providers" still buy gear from traditional IT vendors like Dell, EMC, HP, and Cisco for their own internal corporate IT. It's the dirty little secret that somehow always gets overlooked when everyone is espousing how we no longer need infrastructure when it can all just "Live in the cloud".
The problem of these companies is that they sell highly overpriced hardware that is in the best case sold because the consumer really wants support and risk avoidance, in the middle case because of vendor lock-in and in the worst case because of direct or indirect corruption.<p>Obviously this is not economically efficient, and thus eventually the scheme has to unravel.
The fact that Cobol is still alive and kicking illustrates that once in place, large systems are hard to replace. Costs and budgets matter too.<p>EDIT: why did this get downvoted - am I factually incorrect or you simply disagree and want an echo-chamber?
It could take a while yet before all companies big and small start using the cloud to its full potential though ... in my experience people in management are usually against it, citing data security issues.
This is a reasonable forecast, those big-irons will not go away soon, and they will be needed for a long while, it's just the booming age for them are indeed numbered.<p>While reading this I was thinking, where does Apple fit? Does it have any big plan for enterprise at all?
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."<p>Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943<p>"Nuclear-powered vacuum cleaners will probably be a reality within ten years."<p>Alex Lewyt, president of Lewyt vacuum company, 1955<p>"Two years from now, spam will be solved."<p>Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, 2004