Dell, EMC, HP, Cisco are the walking dead • Hacker News Board

Re: Dell, EMC, HP, Cisco are the walking dead

#41

Post by zaphar » Mon, Oct 12, 2015, 2:48 PM UTC

mkozlows wrote: post #13

iheartmemcache wrote: post #7

This is such a perception skewed by Silicon-Valley-Syndrome. 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. I'm going to choose SAP or Dynamics (or one of the handful of other ERP's with name recognition) on DB2…

So two things: 1. Cloud providers are making it easy for legacy businesses to take baby steps. You don't have to use a NoSQL solution with AWS Dynamo, you can use Postgres with RDS. Or if you're hyper-conservative/stuck with legacy stuff, you can run Oracle with RDS. Or get an EC2 instance and install your own personal copy of Oracle on it. You don't have to jump to full modernity right away, you can take the easy wi…

    Or get an EC2 instance and install your own personal copy 
    of Oracle on it.

Good luck with the licensing for running Oracle on an EC2 instance. How many different cores will Oracle potentially be running on? Thousands with the way EC2 works. Just wait till Oracle does an audit and watch your back licensing fees skyrocket. But don't worry! There's a way out. Just move it all to Oracle's new in house cloud. They'll even help with the move for a very "reasonable" consulting fee.

Re: Dell, EMC, HP, Cisco are the walking dead

#42

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Oct 12, 2015, 2:49 PM UTC

Karunamon wrote: post #35

adrianN wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there are plenty of businesses which would never put their data on someone else's servers. Also, you should never underestimate corporate inertia. Switching to a new system is immensely expensive, for many companies it won't happen, ever. Just look how many companies are still using decade old hardware and scour ebay for replacement 286 processors.

How much of that immense expense is due to various factors that can be summed up as "obstinance", and how much is due to actual, practical, tangible factors? I'm not being snarky - I've seen many a large business make many a horrible decision, not due to a dispassionate evaluation of the pros and cons of each option, but because the people in charge hate change. And it's not that said change would be necessarily pain…

[deleted]

Re: Dell, EMC, HP, Cisco are the walking dead

#43

Post by a3voices » Mon, Oct 12, 2015, 2:49 PM UTC

manigandham wrote: post #30

mkozlows wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook and Google and Amazon do not use Cisco networking equipment, nor do they use Dell servers: http://www.wired.com/2014/11/facebooks-new-data-center-bad-n... That's basically the point of the article: These companies that actually had to get up to that kind of massive scale quickly discovered that the way hawked by these big expensive "enterprise" companies didn't work. It was expensive and insufficient. So the…

Facebook, Google, Amazon (while big) are nowhere near the majority of the servers used in the world.

Are you sure? Internet traffic follows a power law distribution.

Re: Dell, EMC, HP, Cisco are the walking dead

#44

Post by exelius » Mon, Oct 12, 2015, 2:51 PM UTC

parasubvert wrote: post #18

exelius wrote: post #11

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"!…

All of your examples seem to lack a lot of context. Yes, these companies are all under pressure. But most of them are still in slow growth and working hard at it. There is also quite a bit of innovation in these places. The problem is the market model is changing - that innovation (cloud) undermines everything else. Their biggest liability is their customer base that IS NOT changing and continues to pay for these pro…

Apple is a different beast... try not to think of them as a technology company. The Apple that was a technology company died 18 years ago and was reborn as a consumer products brand that is backed up by a hell of an engineering org. But marketing/branding makes all the decisions and sets the direction; engineering just helps move the needle of what's possible.

EMC is generally just fucked because their potential customer base is shrinking. While I don't think everyone everywhere will move everything to the cloud, enough migration is heading in that direction that storage appliances seem like a risky business (especially considering the big cloud providers just roll their own rather than buy from EMC).

Don't get me wrong -- I fight the same battles with big companies about how their stupid new $50million data center can't hope to compete with AWS on cost, reliability, security or functionality. AWS runs datacenters at the billion dollar scale. CIOs/CTOs have the mindset of "it'll be better if we control it" -- but then don't realize how expensive it is to replicate all the niceness that you get from AWS like management interfaces, workflow control, etc. All those systems have to be grafted on later, and are naturally behind the curve.

Re: Dell, EMC, HP, Cisco are the walking dead

#45

Post by mrweasel » Mon, Oct 12, 2015, 2:52 PM UTC

mkozlows wrote: post #17

clavalle wrote: post #6

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.

Facebook and Google and Amazon do not use Cisco networking equipment, nor do they use Dell servers: http://www.wired.com/2014/11/facebooks-new-data-center-bad-n... That's basically the point of the article: These companies that actually had to get up to that kind of massive scale quickly discovered that the way hawked by these big expensive "enterprise" companies didn't work. It was expensive and insufficient. So the…

There's still going to be a large number of small companies that will be needing servers. There might be so many hardware providers as is, but you can't blame Dell for attempting to be the last man standing.

Similarly with Cisco, you can run the internet exchange of a small country on a single stock Cisco switch, and many do. Cisco isn't going anywhere in the near future. Amazon, Google and Facebook might not have a need for them, but thousand of other companies do, even large datacenters.

Re: Dell, EMC, HP, Cisco are the walking dead

#46

Post by fredkbloggs » Mon, Oct 12, 2015, 2:52 PM UTC

exelius wrote: post #23

ap22213 wrote: post #10

First thing I thought when reading the headline was 'so is Oracle'. Glad it's mentioned in the article. 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. Now, of course, cloud isn't here yet. There are certainly lots of issues around security, auditing, p…

Oracle is not quite as fucked as everyone else on the rest of the list. Oracle has the benefit of offering products that solve very real, very complex business problems: they aren't selling technology infrastructure. Oracle's core products are largely around financial and operational automation, and they are well understood by integrators across many industries. Their biggest threat is something like Salesforce -- bu…

The real reason Oracle is still making money (though never nearly as much as analysts forecast) is none of the above. It was mentioned in the article and has been discussed here many times in the past as well. For example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10207495 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9953657. Oracle's sales force is trained to use "license audits", threats of same, and various forms of bundling, such as MSAs and minimum sales commitments, to sell what Oracle wants to sell, not what the customer wants or needs. They are very effective in this, and it is the primary reason Oracle remains in business.

That said, the Oracle database product, while extremely expensive and obnoxiously licensed, is not without technical merit. There is a genuine market for it, just not a $50b one. One could say the same for what these other so-called dinosaurs are selling.

Re: Dell, EMC, HP, Cisco are the walking dead

#47

Post by VLM » Mon, Oct 12, 2015, 2:54 PM UTC

clavalle wrote: post #6

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.

One interesting observation about commodity hardware is it increases in capability faster than the rate of many business demands. In the short term if there's a lack of infrastructure you can grow shipping at a very fast rate, until you catch up...

In the long run the "walking dead" from the article are doomed when due to technological growth an entire data center can be converted to a single rack in a closet without any expensive monthly upstream bandwidth charges and nickel and dimeing from a cloud. Those suppliers have expensive corporate infrastructure that depends on shipping $50M data centers in 2005 not a single $100K rack in 2015, or 2025 or 2035 or whatever, to do the same task. Maybe a great sales campaign can convince them to double their usage, that still leaves them $49.8M in the hole, non-inflation adjusted (ouch).

Computational use for non-computer businesses is kinda like electricity in the VERY long term. If you look at the early years of the growth of electricity vs GDP or whatever, you can rapidly get strange ideas like the average office in 2015 based on projections from 1915 should be radiating heat like the surface of the sun. However, here we are, there is a natural leveling off of how much electricity or municipal water or food a business can usefully consume per unit of GDP. Assuming GDP only goes up, inflation adjusted (LOL). When companies bounce off those limits, life will get very exciting for "eternal Moores Law growth forever" oriented suppliers for those businesses. Based on facebook use stat growth rates in 2007 we should all be spending 78626 hours per day on facebook... didn't happen... building a supplier company based on that assumed growth trend will lead to tears. Moores law says the transistor will shrink not that people will buy it.

Re: Dell, EMC, HP, Cisco are the walking dead

#48

Post by devit » Mon, Oct 12, 2015, 2:54 PM UTC

creshal wrote: post #34

devit wrote: post #24

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. Obviously this is not economically efficient, and thus eventually the scheme has to unravel.

Overpriced, really? Dell sells desktop boxes sufficient for office work with three years on-site support for under 400€, and fast servers for under 1000€ kitted out. If that's overpriced I really need to talk to your hardware supplier. (Of course, they all have high-end products, but the breadth of the offerings is usually high enough that they're always an option. They're not stupid.)

Indeed, this is not true for a substantial portion of Dell's products.

Re: Dell, EMC, HP, Cisco are the walking dead

#49

Post by rtets » Mon, Oct 12, 2015, 2:56 PM UTC

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."

Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943

"Nuclear-powered vacuum cleaners will probably be a reality within ten years."

Alex Lewyt, president of Lewyt vacuum company, 1955

"Two years from now, spam will be solved."

Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, 2004

Re: Dell, EMC, HP, Cisco are the walking dead

#50

Post by ausjke » Mon, Oct 12, 2015, 2:58 PM UTC

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.

While reading this I was thinking, where does Apple fit? Does it have any big plan for enterprise at all?