Available To The Right Buyer: Sun Microsystems

antediluvian writes "The Seattle Times reports Sun Microsystems shares surged forward on speculation the computer maker may be bought by a rival company. Prospective buyers could include Dell, IBM or Hewlett-Packard. Computer sales of rival companies have been outpacing sales of Sun's machines. Over the past three years Sun's stock has declined 92 percent."

Comments

what about N1?

[stonebeat.org]

N1 is a new IT architecture from Sun. I think it is awesome new technology/architecture, but I also think there is no market for that currently. N1 was in wrong place at the wrong time. There are lot of other things that need to be done before N1 can be implemented anywhere.

What will happen to N1 after the acquisition? IBM already has a similar product callled Tivoli. If IBM purchases Sun, N1 will either be slashed or integrated into Tivoli. Any thoughts on that?

Re:what about N1?

[nemaispuke]

Tivoli cannot do the same things as N1, unless IBM has added some amazing tweaks to it that nobody knows about or uses. N1 allows a data center to manage its resources based on business rather than technical requirements. The example that was given to the local Sun User's Group meeting was say your web site was being hammered by requests (Christmas). By using the console and selecting the appropriate options, you could do the following: 1. Reallocate bandwidth 2. Build and deploy new web servers to meet the demand (provided you have the hardware available) This is done with one person, not a team of system, web, and network administrators. Most of the technology to support N1 is already in Solaris (Resource Manager, Live Upgrade, Solaris Flash, JumpStart). I don't know about you, but I can find plenty of uses for N1, and companies wanting to shore up their bottom line can as well. IBM and HP are also working on similar technologies, but Sun is farther ahead and has made purchases of companies that have technology Sun needs (Sun purchased a company to get the "provisioning engine" technology for N1). If N1 actually works (and to me it does), there will be a huge change in how data centers are managed. And a lot of IT people could potentially be out of work!

NEWS for nerds?

[elmegil]

More like RUMORS for nerds.

An institutional buyer made a large purchase of Sun Stock. That fueled rumors about a buyout, but it seems a lot more likely that after reporting (admittedly very modest) profits in the last quarter and one analyst recently shifting Sun to buy, some institutional buyer wanted to get some "bargain" stock that they think will appreciate well in the coming years. Given how steady the stock price has been between 3 & 4 dollars, it does seem likely that it's bottomed out, so unless you think Sun is imminently going out of business (which I sure don't) this kind of buy seems to make sense more from that standpoint than from any bs about being bought by a bigger player.

As far as it goes, Sun's culture is so antithetical to IBM and to the "new" HP that I can't see either of them wanting to take Sun on....

Wrong, rose on large institutional investment

[ChrisRijk]

Sun's Rise Likely From a Trade, Not an Offer

• 
  At UBS Warburg, Jack Francis, co-head of equity trading, said the sudden surge in price followed a 5-million-share block trade, considered to be a very large buy by Wall Street standards. "That was spurring stories of a potential takeover, which doesn't make any sense at all but did add fuel to the upside," said Francis. "The rumor doesn't hold a lot of weight, but in a market like this it gets people off the fence who are looking for any story that could generate alpha."
  

Anyway, Sun are currently valued at $12Bn, and have $5.5Bn sitting in the bank.

Re:Corner's bigger than you think.

[Ewan]

While I hate to say HP-UX is a good OS, it is certainly an OS which runs on Itanium and supports 64 processors.

The new HP Superdome machines with Itanium2 are more powerful CPU-wise than anything Sun makes at the moment.

Ewan

Re:Apple...

[bob_dinosaur]

I don't think you really understand Sun's core business. It's got nothing to do with the desktop and everything to do with servers.

Sun is hurting because now I can replace my low-end and midrange boxes with commodity x86 kit running Linux for about 10-15% of the cost.

At the mid-to-high-end (16+ processors) Sun is still viable and a good choice (I haven't seen good Intel kit that scales over 8 processors), but the volumes in that market probably aren't enough to sustain the required R&D effort, especially as Sun's consulting business - which would push their kit - isn't great. Still, I like our E10000s... they do the job we ask of them pretty well.