ESRI Bails on FOSS4G Performance Shootout

ESRI has withdrawn from the FOSS4G Performance Shootout. There hasn't been any official statement on the Performance Mailing List announced as to the reason why yet, just that they will no longer continue with the exercise.

Why would ESRI pull out so late in the game?? The performance numbers were supposed to be completed this week?? Why put in so many WEEKS of effort in getting the system setup and deal with all the "issues" that were encountered during the setup and testing period to "bail" right at the end??

I've been following the mailing list quite closely, and I have a couple of observations:

1. There was a lot of disorganization in terms of the coordination of the hardware topology, testing procedures, the data configuration, what data to use, what tests would be performed and "who" was responsible for what! It was a total free for all with no scheduling, responsibility and probably the "hand holding" necessary to keep ESRI engaged. It was up to ESRI to meander through the minefield of issues presented with the data, changes to the system, test scripts and hardware.

If your ESRI and you feel like you just jumped into a circus, would you continue to parade in line with the rest of the show?

2. I am EXTREMELY glad I didn't waste any resources on attempting to participate in what should be an EXTREMELY interesting and engaging exercise.

I highly recommend that an independent organization provide a non biased, preapproved methodology, preapproved dataset with the opportunity to put the data in a vendor recommended format (which every customer usually does anyways), capable and diverse hardware set to limit the non-functional limitations, proven performance testing software and methodology to measure LOAD not throughput and the right to review, control the rights of the results to be published/non published, there will be very high participation from ALL the available vendors.

This is even after the publication announcing the "shootout" which I felt was aimed at throwing ESRI under the bus anyways.

What a disaster...