Dry reflections on a possible IBM purchase of Sun

Posted on March 19, 2009 Updated on June 10, 2015

The rumors of this IT mega-merger have been swirling and were in full force this week. I’m not sure yet how the long-term balance of strategic benefits will work out for IBM, as well as the impact on the industry. Who knows, maybe Big Blue wants to take spotlight away from possible controversy involving CEO Sam Palmisano’s monstrous $21 million bonus in 2008, in light of the current AIG drama? Just sayin’…

Benefits

• Sun’s new Open cloud API, very cool
• Sun’s virtualization
• MySQL, and more open-source credentials
• Bigger imprint into the Data center (and the cloud)
• Java

Drawbacks

• Accumulating more overhead…HP took years to digest Compaq
• Sun’s cachet has been fading for many years
• Still not a major network player, despite recent partnership with Juniper
• Still not a major storage player – see EMC, NetApp, Dell and Hitachi
• Java

It’s hard not to interpret IBM wanting to swipe back at Cisco in the race to dominate the emerging cloud market, given that the rumors emerged barely a day after Cisco’s major Unified Computing initiative. But IBM is enhancing their strengths – servers, open source, applications – and not addressing weaknesses in networking and storage with this potential acquisition. HP appears to have a more compelling end to end Data Center offering, with an established EVA StorageWorks line in addition to ProCurve networking. I’m not sold on this one yet…