IBM to buy Sun?

According to the WSJ IBM is in talks to purchase Sun. The MSNBC version of the same story provides a lot more detail. There's a bloomberg article that seems to be down as I write this that indicates that Sun asked HP they turned it down.

One thing that strikes me is that all of this is coming from one source, so there may not be much to this. This could be just a bunch of speculative talk. This same speculative talk also indicates that HP was asked and HP turned Sun down (which is a bit surprising because HP and SUN would be a better fit IMHO).

But if we pretend for a moment that it's all reasonably true some interesting things come to mind. The cross-country nature of the two companies will be a big issue. It's east coast vs west coast. It's suits and ties vs pony tails and sandals. IBM's cathedral approach to Suns bazaar approach. On top of that you can't have HQ's on both coasts. Which one goes? In the end, IBM will 'win out' eventually just out of shear entrenchment, in my opinion. There just isn't enough Sun left to change things. There is the possibility of it being a separate entity, similar to EMC/VMWare. That's likely how they'd start, but eventually they'd restructure under the IBM way of doing things.

Another interesting choice is what becomes of the hardware lines long term? Do they push SPARC out in favor of POWER? Do they do both? Short term they would try both I'm sure, but eventually they would have to drop one or the other. I suspect they would drop SPARC. The high-thread low-Mhz model of the T1 and T2 chips doesn't have as much traction as I think Sun or IBM would like. The POWER line on the other hand takes the same tact as the SPARC64's but with much higher clock rates. Perhaps a T1/2 and POWER lineup would be workable. But it's a tough choice. Neither CPU has the broad adoption of the X86 instruction set CPUs of AMD and Intel. I think in a merged company the sun x86 lines would be gradually dropped within a year in favor of the IBM setup. Hopefully a 'best of both' approach would be taken but I doubt it. As long as the OS's could be ported to both, any of the possible permutations and combinations would likely be workable, with the possible exception of keep everything as is.

The AIX vs Solaris issue would also be interesting. Sun's current sunset dates (if maintained) would have IBM support Solaris for up to 5 years after the decision to stop Solaris. If they decide to drop AIX they're faced with a similar issue (although IBM's EOL policy is a bit more cryptic). Either way you slice this one there are going to be a lot of hurt feelings. The AIX vs Solaris camps would be bitter enemies if it weren't for the common Microsoft enemy. My hunch is Solaris would be taken out back behind the woodshed and not come back. It would likely happen after all of the corporate structures are merged and aligned. Then Solaris would be stopped and open solaris would be the road forward for Solaris hold outs.

The storage area is the only area that seems straight forward to me. And is the only technology area that IBM and Sun can merge easily. Since neither company is storage leader (although IBM has a much larger market share) merging the product lines would be relatively simple (compared to OS or hardware). Neither company has a good story to tell in the mid-range market (although the 7000 line from sun is interesting, if not proven). The high end market is dwindling and I think both companies will not invest a lot in that space and leave it to Hitachi, EMC and NetApp (I exclude HP because the XP is pretty much a HDS...). Combined they could also aggressively go after Dell's market share (and nibble at HP's). Dell is growing by virtue of selling tons of little storage, basically doing it on volume. And since the high-end Sun arrays are re-branded HDS gear, the just have to maintain the support infrastructure. Plus Sun has the better play in the emerging flash market and IP knowledge that would come with that. Add onto that the StorageTek side of the house and it's an idea with some promise. So far, this would be the easiest (but by no means simple) merger.

The other software assets could also bring some value to IBM. Mysql and Java would join IBM's already impressive web offerings. Add Sun's middle-tier and middleware offerings to that mix and you have a very expansive software portfolio. And then there's the Sun ports of Xen and purchase of virtual box. Both of these virtulization offerings would give IBM a small counter to the VMWare juggernaut. And then you can add Open/Star Office to the Lotus brand (when was the last time you saw a SmartSuite purchase?) for an enterprise desktop solution. After a bit of blue-washing the code base and essentially free access to the IBM patent portfolio these products could really take off. There would be a few orphans here and there, like NetBeans. Not sure where Netbeans fit's in a Rational world. But the software portfolios could be a great combined force.

So far analyst reviews are mixed but trending towards 'thumbs down' and I can't say I disagree. The short run would be dreadful and IBM would have to walk a delicate line to avoid loosing Sun's existing customer base and its massive and active development communities. If end users and developers are going to be forced to change, there's no assurance that they will change to IBM. If you have to go through the trouble, you might as well look at all the options. Well, so far it's just idle speculation. Time will tell where this ends up.