Sun's mystery suitor (HP) and how it'll come back into play

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Swoop in?

"HP could easily swoop in and buy some of Sun?s businesses just for market share."

This makes zero sense. In fact, any idea that HP would have acquired Sun or Sun's hardware makes no sense. The only technology Sun has that HP needs is Solaris. HP's high-end play is HP-UX on Itanium. With Nehalem, Itanium's long-term future is in doubt, and its short-term future is under pressure. After all, each Nehalem core is twice as powerful as an Itanium core. Nehalem also supports Intel QuickPath, so Tukwila chipsets can easily be adopted to support Nehalem, as SGI's Ultraviolet system will. Soon, there will be four-socket, eight-core Nehalem 7500 servers available, which will provide about half the performance of today's Montvale Superdomes.

So HP needs an enterprise UNIX OS which supports Xeon which could be the basis for an scalable enterprise platform after Itanium.

HP really has no use for SPARC, unless they decide they want their own chip after Itanium.

Likewise, HP has no reason to want Sun's x86 servers, as HP already dominates that market.

The other thing which makes no sense is selling the storage business to anyone. Sun OEMs high-end storage from HDS, so that really cannot be sold. Sun's midrange systems are LSI based, and HP already has one of the strongest midrange product lines with its EVA systems. The only storage products which another company might want are the new "Open Storage" NAS systems, and these really are just hardware wrapped Solaris, and Oracle wants to keep Solaris. Again, nothing makes sense here.

The only hardware division which makes sense for HP is Sun's tape business. HP is already in the drive business, and could leverage the high-end STK tape systems to compete more broadly with IBM.

Fujitsu could leverage Sun's SPARC product line, with its buyout of Siemens share of its joint venture in Europe, and its revamp of its U.S. operation. Oracle has a very good relationship with Fujitsu.

The idea Oracle only wanted Sun's software does not make sense, because the only software of significance Sun has is Solaris. Java is more of a trademark and brand than a software product. After all, Oracle has a good JVM in its BEA JRocket JVM. Did Oracle buy Sun simply to get control of the Java stewardship?

Maybe Oracle wants to reinvent itself as another IBM, with both software and hardware, and supporting other companies' software on its hardware, and its software on other companies' hardware. Or maybe Oracle just wanted to screw over IBM, and will pick and choose what allies to sell off Sun's hardware to.

Posted by: meh130@...   Posted on: 05/13/09 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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