7 ms·

IBM in Talks to Buy Sun in Bid to Add To Web Heft

95 points by sown 18y ago

alexandros 18y ago
It would be a sad day if Sun stopped being independent, but IBM does seem to be the best match that will preserve the most of Sun. Maybe they can even fix some of the JCP and OOo policy problems. On the other hand, NetBeans will probably go the way of the dodo..
- stcredzero 18y ago
  A friend of mine pointed out that commoditizing someone's product was a great offensive move. He thought that was why IBM funded so many open source projects, many of which were in the Java space. He pointed out that Eclipse is one of the slickest Java IDEs, and what is an Eclipse, but an occlusion of Sun?
  - tome 18y ago
    Joel wrote "Commoditize your complements": http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html
    - stcredzero 18y ago
      That's along the same lines, but my friend thought that IBM's strategy was to eliminate much of the profit potential of what Sun was developing in the Java (software) space by commoditizing it. (Joel points out that with Java, Sun is commoditizing its own hardware.) This brings to mind Apple. Software, Design, and Integration are what distinguish Apple Computer, allowing them to charge a markup above the commodity level. The hardware is largely commodity hardware, except for the fact that it's slickly designed in a way that Apple's competitors have some difficulty matching, and that it's (supposedly) the only hardware that can run OS X. Various Hackintoshes testify to the true commodity nature of Apple hardware. I've been predicting that someone is going to enter the low cost space and offer a truly integrated software/hardware experience based on Linux. I'm wondering if Apple is planning to do just that.
  - briansmith 18y ago
    IBM and Microsoft have taken two different tracks. IBM is trying to everything except custom software development and support contracts because those are the most profitable short-term. They give away low-quality software that is difficult to use and missing important features; then they charge every user the full cost of fixing these problems. Basically, IBM wants you to rent expensive people to run your free software. Microsoft is trying to make custom software development and support contracts unnecessary by selling quality, feature-full software. I'm sure lots of people want to say something snarky about Microsoft's actual software quality, but at least recognize that it is the plan. Basically, Microsoft wants you to buy software that ends up being much cheaper than renting people. Ultimately, they want you to computing appliances that are powered by their software and which don't require any maintenance or custom coding. By the way, there is nothing slick about Eclipse. I am using it every day to write S60 applications and I hate it. I am using IntelliJ IDEA 5.1 (three or four years old, three major versions behind) and IntelliJ is much, much better.
    - ciupicri 18y ago
      You're forgetting about all the Microsoft Certified people and their consulting services, e.g. http://www.microsoft.com/uk/services/consulting/adc.mspx http://www.microsoft.com/uk/services/consulting/adc.mspx
      - briansmith 18y ago
        No, I'm not. Microsoft does have consultants and certification and probably always will. However, every release of every one of their products is designed to reduce the need for those people. For example, the ultimate goal of SharePoint is to remove and/or substantially reduce the need for custom website development.
    - stcredzero 18y ago
      You've no argument from me about IntelliJ being a better IDE. But remember when Eclipse first came out. In my recollection, it set a new bar for Java UI slickness. This is key. Open Source often fail to reach a certain level of polish unless they find some way to receive corporate funding.
- rbanffy 18y ago
  Reminds me of the day Compaq announced they bought DEC... Evolution needs diversity.
adrianwaj 18y ago
Sun were a good 5 years too late open-sourcing their software stack including Java and Solaris, and should have made their hardware easily licensed for cloning. I was saying this in 2002. Only the most adaptable survive.
- davidw 18y ago
  I love open source, and if I had the money, would work with nothing else. That said... for a big business like Sun, would that really have helped? Maybe their stuff would have been more popular, but it would have required a wrenching transition to services that might have hurt them very deeply.
  - adrianwaj 18y ago
    I think they should have taken this alternate Open path and coupled it with business-as-usual in the rest of the organization. So they lose revenues in the normal part of Sun because those customers now pickup their SW for nothing essentially, and instead of Sun then laying off employees, they are shifted into services. One area goes down, another goes up. Hardware at Sun then becomes less focused on manufacturing, and more about building a community of external implementors by providing good HW designs and support. I'm thinking theoretically.
    - davidw 18y ago
      > instead of Sun then laying off employees, they are shifted into services. One area goes down, another goes up. The same people that might make great software producers might be lousy at services, so it's entirely possible that large layoffs would still happen, which would hurt morale. Indeed, 'services' is a different industry, and it's not like you can just pick up from one day to the next and become a services company. IBM managed to do that, so maybe they would be a good fit, but it's not an easy thing to accomplish in any case.
- rbanffy 18y ago
  They are a hardware company. Why would they want people to clone their hardware is beyond me. The IBM PC was cloned and the result is that IBM is a relatively minor player in the PC arena and one that has no meaningful power (much unlike Intel and Microsoft).
geuis 18y ago
All I can say is Timer Warner / AOL. Not a popular opinion, but I really hope Sun dies. I'm probably not up to snuff on their product lines, but I know they've developed and promoted the atrocity that is Java and I think they're quickly killing Mysql. IBM, on the other hand, has proven itself as a company that can reinvent itself over and over and have been doing some very cool things. They're one of the few classic companies that still do actual long term R&D without the requirements that they crank new products out in the next 2 years. It would be really bad for them to buy Sun.
- Dobbs 18y ago
  Sun has some amazing engineering staff. They produced such wonders as Dtrace, Sparc, and ZFS. If IBM were to buy them and take the good portions it would be a huge boon to IBM, Open Source and the software/computing community.
  - adrianwaj 18y ago
    What should IBM do with the Sun brand once it cherry-picks all the good parts?
    - Dobbs 18y ago
      Java is strong (while not most 'hacker's cup of tea) large amounts of buisnesses like it. I could see IBM cleaning up some of the less pleasant sides of it and continuing to support it slash push it under the Sun brand. If they were to rebuild the Sparc line this could also be done under the Sun brand. I could see rebuilding sparc to be useful particuarlly in response to the latest Intel AMD debacle. If they made something like KVM (kernel virtual machines) more strongly built into the hardware this would likewise help them push the line. IBM is a smart company, they could definitely create a decent buisness plan to use Sun to their advantage.
      - pavlov 18y ago
        IBM has the POWER lineage of RISC CPUs for servers, which has consistently beaten Sparc in benchmarks for at least the past eight years or so. POWER also has the advantage of having a shared ISA (and thus shared R&D) with IBM's PowerPC-based mainstream products, e.g. the CPUs used in Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. Thus I think that Sparc will be among the first casualties if this merger goes through.
sireat 18y ago
Sun was undervalued and even at the price IBM appears to be offering, Sun is a good value. Why? Sun still has elaborate R&D, strong balance sheet, multiple revenue streams. Granted, it had overpaid for many acquisitions(I am looking at you MySQL) and hasn't figured out exactly how to leverage all that OSS into income.
- tptacek 18y ago
  "Elaborate" does seem like the right word here.
whatusername 18y ago
A few thoughts through the SUN product line: (Anyone else got ideas that I missed?) SPARC - likely gone.. IBM will probably stick with Power. JAVA - might be good for it.. IBM are big supporters of java, with Eclipse, IBM JRE's, etc MySQL - interesting dilemma - IBM have DB2 CE or whatever it's called as a free DB engine - mysql is not at DB2 level (yet) by any stretch - but if it's good enough - then is it a revenue threat Solaris - IBM have an awesome NIX variant in AIX. Of course - that's why they now push Linux so much.. :P Not sure what would happen to solaris here... DTrace - obviously kept - maybe linux/aix porting? (we can hope) ZFS - again - you'd assume they would keep it. Disk Storage - The thumper, etc seem like pretty good products.. IBM have some storage kit developed internally (DS8000 etc) - and some I believe is OEM.. I think that some gear like the Thumper might be able to replace the OEM gear... (Would also be quite nice behind an SVC) StorageTek (Tape Drives) - These will need some consolidation (although again - some of IBM's kit is OEM) - but at the top end - I would have said that the SL8500 (Sun's) trumps the TS3500 (IBM's) at the high end - so that could be dramatic.. Intel/AMD based servers - I'd guess they'll keep them seperate for as long as they can - eventually standardising down to one of the two lines? (Or perhaps spinning some/all out to Lenovo or someone like that?) OpenOffice - since IBM are pushing it (or a badged variant of it) as Lotus Symphony - you'd assume it would be sticking around... HPC - I can't see IBM dropped BlueGene - but I've got no clue what Sun are really doing in the space... (from wiki: In 2006, Sun built the TSUBAME supercomputer, which was until June 2008 the fastest supercomputer in Asia. .... Ranger has a peak performance of over 500 TFLOPS, and is currently the 6th most powerful supercomputer on the TOP500 list (November 2008).) And Wikipedia has a nice listing of all the goodness of sun hardware: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Sun_Microsystems_hardware http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Sun_Microsystems_hardw...
- alecco 18y ago
  IBM is focusing on services, this is all about getting those juicy support/operations contracts.
- razzmataz 18y ago
  I could always imagine the solaris code base being dumped on a group like ISC or something...
jwilliams 18y ago
IBM should turn Sun into a cloud division. With Java/J2EE, MySQL and their storage/data center expertise it seems like a good match? A full featured J2EE cloud solution could get a lot of traction with all the many corporates heavily invested in Java and looking to reduce costs (IMHO).
- IMorgothI12 18y ago
  IBM probably should drop AIX for Solaris. If IBM were smart they would enable a machine compilable version of Java to destroy C++.
  - lallysingh 18y ago
    Or even better, a good language to replace them both.
osipov 18y ago
Owning VirtualBox virtualization software is a great reason for IBM to buy Sun. IBM is trying to be a major player in the cloud computing space, but it relies on Xen and VMWare for x86 virtualization technology. IBM doesn't have much influence on Xen and its open source development community. Obviously IBM has even less influence over VMWare. So buying a solid x86 virtualization stack like VirtualBox would make IBM a serious contender for cloud computing deployments built from commodity x86 boxes.
- greyboy 18y ago
  Solaris also has zones, which has been tremendously powerful for our customers.
  - tptacek 18y ago
    I suspect you could have made Xen (on the high end) or Jails (on the low end) equally as powerful. I'm not a fan of Zones, and of all the Solaris innovations of the past couple years, I think Zones have the least staying power.
    - patrickg-zill 18y ago
      Yes, you have made your bias very clear on Zones here on HN every time the subject has come up. Clearly they don't work well for you. However, people do use Zones and they clearly do work well. I suppose you have figured out how to use a jail to limit memory and CPU resources of the programs running in a jail? Ooops, that is a zone-only feature; like the time I set up Oracle in a zone and limited it to using no more than 4GB RAM .
      - tptacek 18y ago
        On the high end, I'd use Xen, like all the major large-scale hosting providers do. On the low end, I wouldn't bother trying to do fine grained resource control. It's not exactly insightful to point out my bias against Zones in a response to a comment where I basically say "I'm biased against Zones". I am indeed biased. And I can defend my argument that, as a technological approach, trying to compartmentalize all the kernel namespaces and building ad hoc group-level rlimits is a dead end. For what it's worth, just as your bias in favor of Zones (which I don't fault you for) is based on professional experience, so too is my bias against them.
indiejade 18y ago
Smart move. One of IBM's core competencies is hardware (assembly); one of Sun's core competencies is software (esp. virtual space software) and innovation. The danger, of course, would be in losing that innovation when/if the acquisition occurs. If IBM does end up acquiring Sun, it would probably be a good idea to let it maintain as much independence as possible. There seems to be an inverse relationship between size of an organization and its ability to adapt and innovate.
- Xichekolas 18y ago
  Except that IBM has been selling their hardware units off for years... hard drives to Hitachi, laptops to Lenovo, etc. IBM's core competency now is consulting services supporting software. I think Sun makes sense for them to acquire (their business models are becoming quite similar already)... but IBM's days of having a hardware focus are over.
  - TJensen 18y ago
    Do you think their HPC and server hardware will go, too? I'm guessing they'll stay in whatever hardware business is not commoditized, which means a lot of Sun's hardware fits into IBM's portfolio.
    - Xichekolas 18y ago
      Yeah definitely agree that they'll stay in HPC... like you say, anything that is custom and requires design/support.
aagnihot 18y ago
This article quotes the acquisition at around $6.5 billion(http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE52H1GS20090318 http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE52H1GS20090318). StorageTek acquisition was $4.1 billion(http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/09/01/HNsunstortekcomplete_1.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/09/01/HNsunstortekcomple...) and MySql AB acquisition was around $1 billion. That makes $5 billion. So is rest of the Sun worth $1.5 billion? Clearly, it seems that these acquisitions have decreased Sun's valuation, rather than increasing it. Also, I didn't see any point in buying MySql AB for $1 billion.
pstuart 18y ago
AMD has a market cap of 1.70B, they could fold that in too.
aagnihot 18y ago
Moreover, there is an important lesson to learn. Open source is not the solution for poor revenues. Sun has OpenSPARC, OpenSolaris, Java, OpenOffice, MySql and what not...But in terms of revenue, it hardly made a difference.

95 points by sown 18y ago

It would be a sad day if Sun stopped being independent, but IBM does seem to be the best match that will preserve the most of Sun. Maybe they can even fix some of the JCP and OOo policy problems. On the other hand, NetBeans will probably go the way of the dodo..

stcredzero 18y ago
A friend of mine pointed out that commoditizing someone's product was a great offensive move. He thought that was why IBM funded so many open source projects, many of which were in the Java space. He pointed out that Eclipse is one of the slickest Java IDEs, and what is an Eclipse, but an occlusion of Sun?
- tome 18y ago
  Joel wrote "Commoditize your complements": http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html
  - stcredzero 18y ago
    That's along the same lines, but my friend thought that IBM's strategy was to eliminate much of the profit potential of what Sun was developing in the Java (software) space by commoditizing it. (Joel points out that with Java, Sun is commoditizing its own hardware.) This brings to mind Apple. Software, Design, and Integration are what distinguish Apple Computer, allowing them to charge a markup above the commodity level. The hardware is largely commodity hardware, except for the fact that it's slickly designed in a way that Apple's competitors have some difficulty matching, and that it's (supposedly) the only hardware that can run OS X. Various Hackintoshes testify to the true commodity nature of Apple hardware. I've been predicting that someone is going to enter the low cost space and offer a truly integrated software/hardware experience based on Linux. I'm wondering if Apple is planning to do just that.
- briansmith 18y ago
  IBM and Microsoft have taken two different tracks. IBM is trying to everything except custom software development and support contracts because those are the most profitable short-term. They give away low-quality software that is difficult to use and missing important features; then they charge every user the full cost of fixing these problems. Basically, IBM wants you to rent expensive people to run your free software. Microsoft is trying to make custom software development and support contracts unnecessary by selling quality, feature-full software. I'm sure lots of people want to say something snarky about Microsoft's actual software quality, but at least recognize that it is the plan. Basically, Microsoft wants you to buy software that ends up being much cheaper than renting people. Ultimately, they want you to computing appliances that are powered by their software and which don't require any maintenance or custom coding. By the way, there is nothing slick about Eclipse. I am using it every day to write S60 applications and I hate it. I am using IntelliJ IDEA 5.1 (three or four years old, three major versions behind) and IntelliJ is much, much better.
  - ciupicri 18y ago
    You're forgetting about all the Microsoft Certified people and their consulting services, e.g. http://www.microsoft.com/uk/services/consulting/adc.mspx http://www.microsoft.com/uk/services/consulting/adc.mspx
    - briansmith 18y ago
      No, I'm not. Microsoft does have consultants and certification and probably always will. However, every release of every one of their products is designed to reduce the need for those people. For example, the ultimate goal of SharePoint is to remove and/or substantially reduce the need for custom website development.
  - stcredzero 18y ago
    You've no argument from me about IntelliJ being a better IDE. But remember when Eclipse first came out. In my recollection, it set a new bar for Java UI slickness. This is key. Open Source often fail to reach a certain level of polish unless they find some way to receive corporate funding.
rbanffy 18y ago
Reminds me of the day Compaq announced they bought DEC... Evolution needs diversity.

adrianwaj 18y ago

Sun were a good 5 years too late open-sourcing their software stack including Java and Solaris, and should have made their hardware easily licensed for cloning. I was saying this in 2002. Only the most adaptable survive.

davidw 18y ago
I love open source, and if I had the money, would work with nothing else. That said... for a big business like Sun, would that really have helped? Maybe their stuff would have been more popular, but it would have required a wrenching transition to services that might have hurt them very deeply.
- adrianwaj 18y ago
  I think they should have taken this alternate Open path and coupled it with business-as-usual in the rest of the organization. So they lose revenues in the normal part of Sun because those customers now pickup their SW for nothing essentially, and instead of Sun then laying off employees, they are shifted into services. One area goes down, another goes up. Hardware at Sun then becomes less focused on manufacturing, and more about building a community of external implementors by providing good HW designs and support. I'm thinking theoretically.
  - davidw 18y ago
    > instead of Sun then laying off employees, they are shifted into services. One area goes down, another goes up. The same people that might make great software producers might be lousy at services, so it's entirely possible that large layoffs would still happen, which would hurt morale. Indeed, 'services' is a different industry, and it's not like you can just pick up from one day to the next and become a services company. IBM managed to do that, so maybe they would be a good fit, but it's not an easy thing to accomplish in any case.
rbanffy 18y ago
They are a hardware company. Why would they want people to clone their hardware is beyond me. The IBM PC was cloned and the result is that IBM is a relatively minor player in the PC arena and one that has no meaningful power (much unlike Intel and Microsoft).

geuis 18y ago

All I can say is Timer Warner / AOL. Not a popular opinion, but I really hope Sun dies. I'm probably not up to snuff on their product lines, but I know they've developed and promoted the atrocity that is Java and I think they're quickly killing Mysql. IBM, on the other hand, has proven itself as a company that can reinvent itself over and over and have been doing some very cool things. They're one of the few classic companies that still do actual long term R&D without the requirements that they crank new products out in the next 2 years. It would be really bad for them to buy Sun.

Dobbs 18y ago
Sun has some amazing engineering staff. They produced such wonders as Dtrace, Sparc, and ZFS. If IBM were to buy them and take the good portions it would be a huge boon to IBM, Open Source and the software/computing community.
- adrianwaj 18y ago
  What should IBM do with the Sun brand once it cherry-picks all the good parts?
  - Dobbs 18y ago
    Java is strong (while not most 'hacker's cup of tea) large amounts of buisnesses like it. I could see IBM cleaning up some of the less pleasant sides of it and continuing to support it slash push it under the Sun brand. If they were to rebuild the Sparc line this could also be done under the Sun brand. I could see rebuilding sparc to be useful particuarlly in response to the latest Intel AMD debacle. If they made something like KVM (kernel virtual machines) more strongly built into the hardware this would likewise help them push the line. IBM is a smart company, they could definitely create a decent buisness plan to use Sun to their advantage.
    - pavlov 18y ago
      IBM has the POWER lineage of RISC CPUs for servers, which has consistently beaten Sparc in benchmarks for at least the past eight years or so. POWER also has the advantage of having a shared ISA (and thus shared R&D) with IBM's PowerPC-based mainstream products, e.g. the CPUs used in Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. Thus I think that Sparc will be among the first casualties if this merger goes through.

sireat 18y ago

Sun was undervalued and even at the price IBM appears to be offering, Sun is a good value. Why? Sun still has elaborate R&D, strong balance sheet, multiple revenue streams. Granted, it had overpaid for many acquisitions(I am looking at you MySQL) and hasn't figured out exactly how to leverage all that OSS into income.

tptacek 18y ago
"Elaborate" does seem like the right word here.

whatusername 18y ago

A few thoughts through the SUN product line: (Anyone else got ideas that I missed?) SPARC - likely gone.. IBM will probably stick with Power. JAVA - might be good for it.. IBM are big supporters of java, with Eclipse, IBM JRE's, etc MySQL - interesting dilemma - IBM have DB2 CE or whatever it's called as a free DB engine - mysql is not at DB2 level (yet) by any stretch - but if it's good enough - then is it a revenue threat Solaris - IBM have an awesome NIX variant in AIX. Of course - that's why they now push Linux so much.. :P Not sure what would happen to solaris here... DTrace - obviously kept - maybe linux/aix porting? (we can hope) ZFS - again - you'd assume they would keep it. Disk Storage - The thumper, etc seem like pretty good products.. IBM have some storage kit developed internally (DS8000 etc) - and some I believe is OEM.. I think that some gear like the Thumper might be able to replace the OEM gear... (Would also be quite nice behind an SVC) StorageTek (Tape Drives) - These will need some consolidation (although again - some of IBM's kit is OEM) - but at the top end - I would have said that the SL8500 (Sun's) trumps the TS3500 (IBM's) at the high end - so that could be dramatic.. Intel/AMD based servers - I'd guess they'll keep them seperate for as long as they can - eventually standardising down to one of the two lines? (Or perhaps spinning some/all out to Lenovo or someone like that?) OpenOffice - since IBM are pushing it (or a badged variant of it) as Lotus Symphony - you'd assume it would be sticking around... HPC - I can't see IBM dropped BlueGene - but I've got no clue what Sun are really doing in the space... (from wiki: In 2006, Sun built the TSUBAME supercomputer, which was until June 2008 the fastest supercomputer in Asia. .... Ranger has a peak performance of over 500 TFLOPS, and is currently the 6th most powerful supercomputer on the TOP500 list (November 2008).) And Wikipedia has a nice listing of all the goodness of sun hardware: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Sun_Microsystems_hardware http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Sun_Microsystems_hardw...

alecco 18y ago
IBM is focusing on services, this is all about getting those juicy support/operations contracts.
razzmataz 18y ago
I could always imagine the solaris code base being dumped on a group like ISC or something...

jwilliams 18y ago

IBM should turn Sun into a cloud division. With Java/J2EE, MySQL and their storage/data center expertise it seems like a good match? A full featured J2EE cloud solution could get a lot of traction with all the many corporates heavily invested in Java and looking to reduce costs (IMHO).

IMorgothI12 18y ago
IBM probably should drop AIX for Solaris. If IBM were smart they would enable a machine compilable version of Java to destroy C++.
- lallysingh 18y ago
  Or even better, a good language to replace them both.

osipov 18y ago

Owning VirtualBox virtualization software is a great reason for IBM to buy Sun. IBM is trying to be a major player in the cloud computing space, but it relies on Xen and VMWare for x86 virtualization technology. IBM doesn't have much influence on Xen and its open source development community. Obviously IBM has even less influence over VMWare. So buying a solid x86 virtualization stack like VirtualBox would make IBM a serious contender for cloud computing deployments built from commodity x86 boxes.

greyboy 18y ago
Solaris also has zones, which has been tremendously powerful for our customers.
- tptacek 18y ago
  I suspect you could have made Xen (on the high end) or Jails (on the low end) equally as powerful. I'm not a fan of Zones, and of all the Solaris innovations of the past couple years, I think Zones have the least staying power.
  - patrickg-zill 18y ago
    Yes, you have made your bias very clear on Zones here on HN every time the subject has come up. Clearly they don't work well for you. However, people do use Zones and they clearly do work well. I suppose you have figured out how to use a jail to limit memory and CPU resources of the programs running in a jail? Ooops, that is a zone-only feature; like the time I set up Oracle in a zone and limited it to using no more than 4GB RAM .
    - tptacek 18y ago
      On the high end, I'd use Xen, like all the major large-scale hosting providers do. On the low end, I wouldn't bother trying to do fine grained resource control. It's not exactly insightful to point out my bias against Zones in a response to a comment where I basically say "I'm biased against Zones". I am indeed biased. And I can defend my argument that, as a technological approach, trying to compartmentalize all the kernel namespaces and building ad hoc group-level rlimits is a dead end. For what it's worth, just as your bias in favor of Zones (which I don't fault you for) is based on professional experience, so too is my bias against them.

indiejade 18y ago

Smart move. One of IBM's core competencies is hardware (assembly); one of Sun's core competencies is software (esp. virtual space software) and innovation. The danger, of course, would be in losing that innovation when/if the acquisition occurs. If IBM does end up acquiring Sun, it would probably be a good idea to let it maintain as much independence as possible. There seems to be an inverse relationship between size of an organization and its ability to adapt and innovate.

Xichekolas 18y ago
Except that IBM has been selling their hardware units off for years... hard drives to Hitachi, laptops to Lenovo, etc. IBM's core competency now is consulting services supporting software. I think Sun makes sense for them to acquire (their business models are becoming quite similar already)... but IBM's days of having a hardware focus are over.
- TJensen 18y ago
  Do you think their HPC and server hardware will go, too? I'm guessing they'll stay in whatever hardware business is not commoditized, which means a lot of Sun's hardware fits into IBM's portfolio.
  - Xichekolas 18y ago
    Yeah definitely agree that they'll stay in HPC... like you say, anything that is custom and requires design/support.

aagnihot 18y ago

This article quotes the acquisition at around $6.5 billion(http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE52H1GS20090318 http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE52H1GS20090318). StorageTek acquisition was $4.1 billion(http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/09/01/HNsunstortekcomplete_1.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/09/01/HNsunstortekcomple...) and MySql AB acquisition was around $1 billion. That makes $5 billion. So is rest of the Sun worth $1.5 billion? Clearly, it seems that these acquisitions have decreased Sun's valuation, rather than increasing it. Also, I didn't see any point in buying MySql AB for $1 billion.

pstuart 18y ago

AMD has a market cap of 1.70B, they could fold that in too.

aagnihot 18y ago

Moreover, there is an important lesson to learn. Open source is not the solution for poor revenues. Sun has OpenSPARC, OpenSolaris, Java, OpenOffice, MySql and what not...But in terms of revenue, it hardly made a difference.