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I remain a fan of Sun as a business, they’re products remain industrial strength (when I’ve asked managers and engineers about them), Solaris is getting good press, and they’re support and investment in open source has to be congratulated.

The Sun/IBM deal in which IBM buys out Sun’s business raises a few questions. Please note that this is in no way a negative commentary, simply some questions/statements.

• Is it a buy out or an integration? Which bits do we keep? The x86? SPARC? Sun’s blades?
• What happens to the SPARC processor? It might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but that we have an alternative platform, that customers may be heavily invested in in terms of application and infrastructure. An example of this could be the HP/Compaq decommission of the Alpha processor which is still a topic of debate with colleagues.
• How do we manage the sales and support of the two organizations, the way IBM sells might be very different to the way Sun sells and supports its servers.
• How do we manage the integration in terms of delivery, branding and support? Would I as a Sun customer find that I stopped buying x86 Sun servers and have to buy IBM? Would this make me think about HP/Dell or someone else like Fujitsu or Gary down the road who makes his own?

I can see core benefits for IBM:

• Greater exposure to the MySQL market – which could be huge if as I think we’ll see more enterprises switch to it as a platform, maybe not for everything but for some applications/roles?
• Greater exposure to Sun’s customers, it’s research and knowledge of it’s core sectors including it’s movements into open source, open solaris, linux etc.
• Exposure to Sun’s revenue, it’s innovative products and services such as a the xVM, technologies within Solaris, and their shipping container data center?

The deal will raise a number of issues which will get resolved as they always do if it goes ahead. As ever, I wish the management teams and employees of the organizations the very best for the future and look forward to seeing what benefits to the end user community and indeed to competition or innovation arise from it.

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