Thursday, March 19, 2009

IBM Signals Strategy Shift With Talks to Buy Sun - WSJ.com

"The talks come amid increasing competition over supplying corporate data centers with hardware. Cisco Systems Inc. this week said it would be entering the server business and taking on IBM and Hewlett-Packard Co.

While H-P and Dell Inc. have pushed standardized technology for corporate data centers, both IBM and Sun have a strategy of stressing high-end machines with proprietary software.

A deal would also give IBM more weapons to battle Microsoft Corp. for market share of the software that runs large computers, and would enhance IBM's portfolio of software that competes against Oracle Corp. for handling large databases and in helping customers develop applications for their Web sites."


I was at a users meeting where people were claiming they could run Sun software in emulation mode on IBM mainframes and get better speed and reliability. They were petitioning Sun to officially sanction this.

IBM mainframes have become essentially card cages for just about any type of processor (including Intel) which can be mixed and matched every which way. You can run virtual versions of just about any system side by side, and if you actually have a processor card for the target architecture the “emulation” becomes real-time.

Merger with Sun will certainly simplify the playing field. Just in time for Cisco to enter and mess it up again.

Get out the popcorn.

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