Hardware

One thing that bugs me about Oracle is the have such a great love for 1) Giving EVERYTHING its own separate name, 2) Making those names really unhelpful as to what exactly the software does, and 3) assigning version numbers AND release levels AND update levels, so you end up with really simple names like "Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center Grid Cloud Control 15q, Release 4". Obviously I'm exaggerating a very little bit, but that's how it seems sometimes. And as far as I can tell, there's no document that says exactly what each one is, exactly what it does, how it's different from others, and how they all relate to one another. Is Grid part of Enterprise Manager? How about Cloud Control? Do you have to install them all? The answers may be obvious to some people, but hardly intuitive for those just starting to use them. And then of course on top of that, it seems like every other version they rename everything, place it under some other product line, and just expect you to know somehow. And of course you often find documents around the web and within Oracle's docs that refer to older versions, often by different names. Does the naming insanity ever stop? Every time I think I'm getting a handle on it, Oracle re-brands things somehow. And naturally every single product in the entire company has to start with "Oracle...", because if they weren't, someone might forget who made it.

This is really confusing and annoying and you're just supposed to magically know it somehow. And when new versions come out. And where to download them. Oh, you can set stuff up to do that automatically? Would that be in Cloud Control, Grid, or Ops Center? Which version and which revision? From which of Oracle's several different places to download stuff? Sure, it's simple to find all kinds of marketdrone babblespeak papers about "stack integration" and how wonderful Oracle is and how slick everything will be and how cool Oracle products are and how awesome the integration is... but really frigging hard to find specific information about what the products do, how they relate to each other, what versions and releases there are, what the past and current versions are, when new versions are coming out, any name changes, and so on. there's no road map for all this stuff, apparently you're just supposed to read Every Single Press Release oracle puts out and spend half your life piecing it all together.

Did it never occur to the marketing drones that maybe, just maybe, all this branding babble is really confusing to everyone? To the media, to the people who use their products? That maybe it's annoying for p[eopel to waste valuable hours just combing through a billion web pages and white papers and press releases just to try to figure out which softwasre product out of ten thosuanmd that you need, and what the most recent version is, and how it relates to other products in the family?

Having said all that - sorry for getting off on a rant - what is the deal with Cloud Control? And Grid? And Enterprise Manager? And Ops Center? What is the structure/relationship? What are the most recent versions? When is the version of Ops Center that supports Solaris 11 and the new virtualization coming out? Will that be a new version of Enterprise Manager, or of Ops Center? Will it be a version number change or a release level change?

Not that I'm bitter or anything.