John Fowler delvers an Oracle Systems Strategy Update webcast. Better late than never.

There weren’t any surprises. The key take-aways I think are:

• Roadmap for SPARC and Solaris out to 2015.
• SPARC will deliver “2x plus performance improvement every 2 years”
• Ultimate devotion to SPARC platform.
• 2 SPARC server lines: T-Series for lots of threads, M-Series for lots of sockets.
• “Niagara”/”UltraSPARC” branding isn’t present at all… its all just “SPARC”.
• Solaris 11 is coming in last 2011 with a beta/preview coming to “enterprise customers” soon

The presentation really boiled down to “technology will move fast in the next 5 years, Solaris and SPARC rule.” Clearly Oracle has a plan and will execute strongly.

Maybe I have Sun-Purple colored glasses on, but it really felt like this lacked the kind of technical grit we were used to. There is no new exciting technology being introduced, no great innovation to look forward to, just steady incremental improvements in the technology. Feels a bit like HP really.

Solaris 11 was inevitable. You can’t introduce IPS to Solaris 10, it breaks too much, so Solaris 11 has to happen, and will bring with it all the Nevada goodness. It looks like following its release we’ll be seeing annual updates that will focus primarily on scalability (to optimize for expanding hardware capabilities) through 2015.

So, the good news is that finally have a roadmap and we know Solaris 11 is coming.

The bad news is that OpenSolaris wasn’t mentioned at all. That was expected though. As soon as Oracle took over in January the word was quickly spread that “OpenSolaris” is a four-letter word.

So, anti-climatic, but glad we finally got a glimpse into the future. All eyes now turn to that first Solaris 11 preview to come “soon”.