Entries tagged with “unix” from Paul Lopez Unwired

Sun is a company that has been in transition from a legacy hardware business to one based on open-source and services. Their exit ramp led to IBM, but will this be a traditional IBM "tuck-in" acquisition or something more? Acquiring Sun for a mere $6.5 billion is only two quarters of $JAVA revenue and if you factor in the $2 billion in cash on their balance sheet, the offer is closer to $4 billion. Sun is exposed to financial services, telecom & manufacturing. They also face secular decline of their Unix servers and tape storage. Newer technology offerings are not scaling up fast enough to offset margin and revenue erosion. IBM will ave difficulty monetizing Sun's open-source software portfolio too. Many application vendors support Linux faster than Solaris, and even with MySQL, they've not been able to get critical mass for OpenSolaris. Maren Mickos, former MySQL CEO bailed from Sun because of the bureaucracy. IBM gets Java but will they keep the way the Java community directs the development of the language? So now IBM will have dueling UNIX banjos. What's the future of AIX? IBM gets an installed base that they can migrate over time but those customers will open up to other competitive choices, so it's no slam dunk. I believe Sun's NetBeans development environment goes by the wayside in favor of IBM's Eclipse. Sun's purchase of Q Layer bolsters their cloud computing offering, but they were just getting started with innovations like Project Caroline. Still, Sun could never show CIOs why they should pay a premium for their products. Sun sells to developers, IBM sells to CIOs. Not sure which one is Billy Redden in this case.