Oracle layoffs signal end of life for Sun SPARC and Solaris products
Oracle Corp. apparently has made a fresh round of job cuts, this time affecting its Solaris and Scalable Processor Architecture business units.
The layoffs were revealed a few days ago by a number of employees who took to the anonymous forum The Layoff to vent their frustration at their former employer. According to some posts, many employees only found out about their layoffs after receiving termination packages via FedEx delivery.
Solaris is a Unix-based operating system designed for Oracle’s SPARC systems, first built by Sun Microsystems Inc., which Oracle acquired in 2010.
First mention of the layoffs came from Simon Phipps, who led Solaris development from 2005 to 2010 at Sun Microsystems. On Sunday he tweeted that Solaris has effectively been killed off by Oracle:
For those unaware, Oracle laid off ~ all Solaris tech staff yesterday in a classic silent EOL of the product. https://t.co/ibs2REGRmj
— Simon Phipps (@webmink) Sept. 2, 2017
Oracle hasn’t made any official announcement itself, but some reports say that a small number of Solaris technical staff have been moved to work with Oracle’s Linux team.
Another big hint of Solaris’ demise came in August, when it was revealed that John Fowler, Oracle’s executive vice president of systems, had left the company. In his role, Fowler was said to be responsible for the delivery of SPARC, Solaris, x86-based servers, networking, disk and storage products.
Oracle itself admitted earlier this year that it was winding down its Solaris development efforts when it published a new product roadmap that removed any references to a new version of Solaris 12 in favor of minor updates.
“As a direct response to customer requests, we’re planning to deliver future Oracle Solaris features and functionality through dot releases instead of more disruptive releases that may have undergone significant test, re-certification and qualification,” Oracle Solaris product manager Glynn Foster said in a blog post at the time.
The new reports of redundancies at Oracle come after the database systems provider laid off 450 workers from its hardware systems division earlier this year.
Oracle is set to host its annual Oracle OpenWorld event in San Francisco Oct. 1-5, when it might provide more information about what’s happening with Solaris.
Image: Peter Kaminski/Flickr
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