IBM & Sun Agreement Puts Pressure on HP 182
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."
Keeping Solaris Relevant (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't buy the idea that Sun is looking to bail out of the hardware business. What they are looking to do is keep Solaris relevant. Sun doesn't want you to think Solaris requires Sun hardware. Sun realized that the only option for people wanting to go with x86/x86_64 chips and run a Unix-like OS on supported hardware meant running Linux or buying Sun gear.
Sun is looking to eat some of Linux's lunch. The question is, why is IBM interested?
Possible Futures of Possible Pasts (Score:3, Interesting)
OTOH, if IBM had bought Apple any of the many times it's been rumored the past decade or more, then Sun might be going out of business right now, without this IBM contract keeping them in business.
why doesn't IBM just buy Sun? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is dissapointing. (Score:2, Interesting)
hardware. Gee... I learned Unix on a Sparc 2 pizza box. I got to play with Sun E4000 machines,
and later Sunfire servers. I'd like to see Sun Get back into the game.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend. (Score:3, Interesting)
Sun has x686 Solaris ports, and IBM's still heavily invested in Inel and AMD hardware, as well as their own Power and Cell CPUs. and SUSE (Microsoft's new best friend) has ports on IBM iron, ranging from tiny stuff up to S390) which I'm sure Sun is jealous of.
IBM, now that SCOx has essentially been wiped from the screen, wants more business, and they don't make that much from Windows stuff. They sell IRON and SERVICES. They stopped operating systems at OS/2 and decided to let others do it. Fine.
IBM has service revenues and gets into a lot of NOCs. They like Linux, 'cause it's all value (read $$) add. They understand iron, they understand services.
The multi-core UltraSparcs are an engineering marvel.... and they're selling like old mortgage debt on Wall Street right now. That silly Linux stuff is pumping it out. Call it a toy if you want, but a bullet is a bullet and if you don't need howitzers, bullets are fine. Add in VMWare, Xen, or whatever, and you have a loaded gun with several rounds in it. That's where servers are going right now: virtual.... and Solaris containers aren't so wonderful.
Microsoft is getting bitten at the ankles by just about everyone. Let's count the ways: uh oh, SCOx will soon run out of money and will stop biting the ankles of IBM and Novell. Pity. Adobe wants to bring an office suite to market. Google hires Sun's StarOffice to be in their bundle. Several companies, weakly but in a virgin kind of way, start selling desktop Linux of various flavors. Microsoft co-opts Ubuntu and makes a slave of Xandros. How silly.
Add to the cake Steve Jobs stealing thunder wherever he can seed clouds. Salt it up with rotten DRM in Vista, and an underwhelming adoption when your server sales are cannibalized by your own inability to ship Windows 2008/Longhorn server.
As Vonnegut might say, Microsoft is feeling the breeze that occurs when the excrement hits the airconditioning. Schwartz is still upwind of that.
Re:why doesn't IBM just buy Sun? (Score:3, Interesting)
I've often wondered if IBM would just up and buy Sun, but there's a few reasons I think it would be a poor acquisition. First of all, the past five years or so have proven that the remaining Sun customers will not jump ship just because Sun's not building the fastest or cheapest unix boxes. These customers stick around because, for some reason, they like Sun. I won't speculate as to why, but there are quite a few reasons why that can be. If IBM buys Sun, those customers immediately like Sun a lot less, because they've been choosing Sun over IBM for years. Secondly, IBM has worked very hard for the past couple decades to never retire any substantial enterprise architecture. Combining AS/400 and RS/6000 has been a decade long project with the loyal AS/400 customers being skeptical the whole way. What does Sun bring? A second proprietary flavor of Unix, another line of RISC unix boxes with a different architecture, another blade chassis, and this newfangled exotic Niagara/Rock architecture. Looking at IBM's server history, they'd retire none of this, and development costs wouldn't decline. They'd rather that Sun foot the bill for continuing development of UltraSPARC and Solaris for a static or declining market, rather than buy those customers only to chase them away when killing the architecture, like what happened with Alpha. I don't see IBM paying $25B to Sun to merely begin making Sun's business worthless. (And I don't think that was the plan with DEC-Alpha, but I don't think Compaq planned on getting enveloped by HP.)
IBM wants growing businesses that improve their profit margin. If IBM could buy select parts of Sun, they might, even if they hardly ever make hardware acquisitions, but they really couldn't get the good without the bad, and even if they did, who knows what goodwill is lost when the profits go to Armonk rather than Silicon Valley?
Re:This is dissapointing. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Solaris is only irrelevant if you play with toy (Score:4, Interesting)
Solaris is a fine OS, and it's got some features that nobody else has. But in some areas it's about 10-15 years behind Linux and BSD. Don't take my word for it - take a look at what Sun itself is saying. [opensolaris.org] Here's a few excerpts:
Solaris installation is ugly, slow, and difficult.
...
We use outdated networking technology (RARP and Bootparams) by default, rather than contemporary network protocols, and thus are often unable to automatically determine configuration attributes that are easily discovered by our competition.
...
We don't include the right set of initial configuration tasks, such as an initial user account, that are commonly provided by competitors. This results in an installed system which boots, and can be logged into as root, but it's then up to the user to hunt around and find a tool (or, more likely, edit the configuration files directly due to our paucity of tools and poor integration of those that exist into the desktop) to create a usable account.
...
One of the significant deficiencies in Solaris compared to our Linux competitors is our ability to easily install additional software after the initial installation.
Well, the good news is that Sun is actually working hard to fix these problems.
What's in it for IBM (Score:5, 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.
Re:Not the first time... (Score:3, Interesting)
IBM and Sun compete, but it's not a zero-sum game. The larger contest is between the economics of plenty and the economics of scarcity. If plenty wins, the markets grow much faster than when scarcity wins, and there's more than enough room for a number of players to do very well indeed. If scarcity wins - and Microsoft and Apple are both playing scarcity tactics, trying to hoard strengths rather than share them - the overall economy stays relatively smaller, and the game moves closer to zero-sum. These are interesting times.
Sun is not dropping the server market... (Score:4, Interesting)
No Sun is far from leaving the server market. Very, VERY far.
Re:Not really mainframes (Score:1, Interesting)
On the teleconference today, IBM stated that there was a port being "worked on", that there was significant customer demand for it, and that they'd like to see it happen. But, they stopped short of saying it would happen, as there are too many variables at the moment.
Re:Not really mainframes (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd be a lot more interested in seeing Solaris on the P or I series servers. I wonder if that's in the works? Is Sun/IBM considering supporting Solaris on Power? Or perhaps Sun is considering transitioning to the Power architecture? It'd make sense - continuing to develop Sparc is a drain on Sun's resources, and IBM is itching to get Power (and it's derivative, Cell) established as an industry standard. I think IBM and Sun might have something to talk about, here.
Nah, this'll never fly (Score:3, Interesting)
Why?
Admin: "There's a bug in the operating system, it's corrupting data under these circumstances"
Sun: "Naw, not at all. The problem is in the IBM firmware. The operating system is doing the right thing".
IBM: "WTF? no it ain't, the problem is in the operating system."
Queue many hours of haranguing both companies.
As opposed to:
Admin: "There's a bug in the OS, it's corrupting data under these circumstances"
Sun (Or IBM): "Actually the dump you sent us indicate the problem is with downrev firmware in your XXX adapter. Here's a patch which fixes it."
See the difference?
There are very good reasons for buying your systems from a single vendor, the big one is that they know how it works all the way down to the metal and they can get someone on site in 4 hours who can fix it, all the way down to the metal.