IBM Buying Sun?
It's looking like IBM may be
buying Sun, for the over-inflated price of $6.5 billion.
My question is why? What exactly does Sun have that IBM would like to have?
Servers? Nope. IBM has plenty of those.
Software? Maybe. Although Solaris and MySQL are very nice products, they're not worth a $6.5 billion premium. Besides, IBM seems to be doing well with Linux as the core OS on the majority of its servers.
Virtualization technology? Hard to believe, seeing as how Sun is running in place on its xVM Server, which it can't get out the door. If anything, the delay in releasing a base hypervisor should scare off any suitors; would that give you confidence in a company's virtualization development capabilities?
Could this be a response to Cisco's entry into the server market? Possibly, but I'm not sure that makes sense either. It would make perfect sense if IBM didn't already make servers, or more specifically, didn't make blade servers. Of course, IBM makes a whole line of blade servers. So IBM can already compete very directly with the Cisco lineup.
So what does IBM hope to get out of this purchase? Beats me.
What are your theories behind this potential purchase? Comment below or e-mail me.
Posted by Keith Ward on 03/18/2009 at 12:48 PM