[ Thanks to Paul
Shread for this link. ]
“Setting the Stage: Industry Platforms Simplify
“It appears that, over the last few years, users’ choices
between vendor architectures have become significantly less
complex. The folding of Sun into Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL), as well as
smaller acquisitions of second-tier database vendors (Sybase) and
middleware and enterprise application suppliers (from PeopleSoft to
BEA), means that a few major vendors now clearly outstrip the rest
in covering the entire software and hardware stack. It is, in fact,
possible to say that there are three major choices for “black boxes
for all needs,” of which two are Oracle and IBM (NYSE: IBM).“At the same time, the choice of platform becomes ever clearer.
Two “movements” have survived and thrived in the chaos of Internet
innovation: the Windows platform and the Linux one. Moreover, two
scalability technologies have become dominant —
“distributed”/scale-out and scale-up — both of which have
added strong virtualization capabilities over the last decade, and
are therefore well positioned for cloud computing and “cloudified,”
virtualized enterprise applications.”