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IBM & Sun Agreement Puts Pressure on HP

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the things-heating-up dept.

eldavojohn writes "IBM has turned to long time rival Sun in an effort to bring Solaris to its mainframes. Sun may be taking this chance to drop out of the server market while at the same time capture Solaris subscriptions via IBM sales. Either way, this certainly pressures HP in the server department."

3 of 182 comments (clear)

  1. why doesn't IBM just buy Sun? by m2943 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Why doesn't IBM just buy Sun? They'd get control of Java and Solaris, they could kill the Sun/Microsoft dealings, and they'd get Sun's server customers. Granted, at 16B, Sun is probably still somewhat overvalued, but I think such a deal would be good for IBM overall.

  2. Re:This is dissapointing. by mjt5282 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Are you kidding me? Sun has just announced the T2 (Niagara 2) processor - 64 concurrent threads. High speed 10G networking. Built-in encryption support for apache. Sun is still in the "game" - its just that the "game" has changed and Sun can no longer make money selling $1M USD refrigerator-sized servers. Hopefully, Sun can make money by selling the most technologically advanced sub $20K servers that are optimized for scalability, throughput and middleware (Databases, web, infra etc).

  3. What's in it for IBM by Daishiman · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Disclaimer: I work for IBM.

    IBM is becoming primarily a services company, doing systems development, "solutions architecture", and outsourced operations. A LOT of people at IBM are familiar with Sun technology and have used it at one point or another. Heck, most of the Global Services staff that maintain AIX servers also maintain Solaris servers. How hard do you think it would be for IBM to expand their business saying "Sure, we support Solaris. We can build that payroll system that you need for your company on your existing Sun infrastructure. BTW, can we interest you in a new pSeries for these workloads?".

    Indeed, this is opening up a new area of the market where they can now claim expertise and recognition. And when the installed customer base is satisfied with what they have, it'll be 10 times easier to migrate their hardware to IBM stuff, and software to IBM proprietary OSes, if there's more profit to be made there.