IBM Withdraws $7B Offer For Sun Microsystems, Says NYT

suraj.sun points to a story in the New York Times indicating that the much-rumored merger (or purchase) that would have united Sun with IBM may have dissolved before it began. Excerpting: "I.B.M., after months of negotiations, withdrew its $7 billion bid for Sun Microsystems on Sunday, one day after Sun's board balked at a slightly reduced offer, according to a person close to the talks. The deal's collapse raises questions about Sun's next step, since the I.B.M. offer was far above the value of the Silicon Valley company's shares when news of the I.B.M. offer first surfaced last month. .. Since last year, Sun executives had been meeting with potential buyers. I.B.M. stepped up, seeing an opportunity to add to its large software business, acquire valuable researchers and consolidate the market for larger, so-called server computers that corporations use in their data centers. ... Now, Sun is free to pursue other suitors, including I.B.M. rivals like Hewlett-Packard and Cisco Systems. Cisco recently entered the market for server computers."

Comments

Cisco Sun

[olddotter]

I hate to think about it, but a Cisco Sun merger might make sense. At least at first glance.

Re:Cisco Sun

[putaro]

Cisco's trying to become a server company. Sun has a lot of credibility in that market, some interesting hardware and, yes Virginia, Solaris is more stable than Linux.

Re:Cisco Sun

[ltmon]

Same reason they've started building it's own servers - they want to expand into new markets.

Sun would sure give them a leg-up, as the two product portfolios have very little crossover, but it remains to be seen if Cisco would be any better at selling Sun technology than Sun has been of late.

As a Sun partner/reseller I'd probably prefer Cisco however, because it's less likely that the cool stuff that Sun makes, which I know and sell, would be just be swallowed up never to be seen again as would likely happen in an IBM deal.

Re:Cisco Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

Solaris is more stable than Linux.

stable. n. resistant to change of position or condition.

Indeed.

Used and admin both. I've never seen a live-locked Solaris system; seen many times on Linux.

Re:Cisco Sun

[GuyverDH]

I've used probably more x86 based UNIX / UNIX like operating systems than many people out here.
Let's face it, there's not a lot of folks who remember turning key switches to load CTIX over CTOS on a Burroughs XE-550. Yes, I know there are some who will remember this, and things even older...

What I'm getting at, is that of all the operating systems I've used, based off of a plethora of chips, motorola, x86, powerpc, pa-risc, alpha, sparc, of them all, Solaris has been the most stable and reliable.

I've seen Linux systems, using kickstart, loaded onto identically configured hardware, end up with different packages loaded, due to some driver quirk that made it not load during one bootup, and work fine on another. I've seen boxes that ran fine, while their identically configured system crapped out repeatedly.

I've taken those same systems, and using a jumpstart server, loaded them with Solaris x86, and ended with identically configured, installed (down to the last package, configuration, etc) systems. All ran stable, fast and reliably.

Try taking your own run at comparing an application written for the A.M.P. stack, and first run it as a LAMP stack, then run it as a SAMP stack. You'll find that the SAMP stack outperforms the LAMP stack, sometimes by almost 100% on the same hardware.

Take a look at the security certifications, the revamped TCP/IP stack able to process millions (possibly billions) of messages per second (depending on the hardware it's configured to run on).

Take a look at the proprietary hardware, including CMT technologies, or the new ROCK processor due out this fall.

For a company that has been so solid in the operating system arena, to also be leading the pack in some of the hardware innovations is simply amazing.

Anyway, as I said, I've used most of the available UNIX/UNIX like operating systems, and find Solaris to be the best of breed for most, if not all, applications. That's my personal 24 years of experience talking, not just empty marketing words...

Re:Now RedHat can buy them ...

[Anthony_Cargile]

To the contrary, I know a local company that deployed an IBM iSeries (previously AS/400) mainframe in their main office, serving two other locations connected via a metropolitan-area T1 line. The machine itself was pretty expensive, yet covered by a 5 or 10 year (can't remember) warranty. The machine would actually call a support technician out to the site whenever it detected an issue with itself, and this has kept their uptime at an astonishing rate, aided by a decent UPS and the hot-swappable hardware.

They've been doing this for many years, and even though their first IT technician whom set this up passed away long since, they've kept the same infrastructure for all these years and it hasn't failed them. They also do this to remain backward-compatible with the older mainframe tapes, which has proven successful. Even at the busiest times, the mainframe is only at 10% utilization, even though it is a pretty low-end model.

This has amazed me about IBM support, and since then I've always weighed IBM as a candidate in new networks, although many of them are too small size or budget-wise to deploy a mainframe. But this is the support I've come to associate IBM with, can't speak for their phone support although everyone seems to outsource to India for phone support these days (a problem I have frequently with Cisco). But this support with Sun's hardware running Linux for cheap was one thing I was longing for with this merger.