Since IBM’s offer seemed to be much higher than Sun’s stock value, we now have the following possible scenarios :
- everything remains the same. It is unlikely to happen, but Sun could stay independent and still compete versus IBM, HP and Dell.
- the Dell option of a merger with Sun still remains possible. Let’s see if Sun and Dell are willing to work as one company
- HP comes back with Oracle and share the hardware and software businesses. However, this option seems a little odd. Sun’s value in the hardware is tightly coupled with the Solaris value proposition. I see not much value in taking over Sun’s storage without ZFS for instance.
- Cisco now entering the blade and hardware market could now become a threat to both HP and IBM by buying Sun

This story is anyway very exciting and I am looking forward to seeing the next moves in the industry !

the OpenOffice.org project is unfortunately already in trouble according to this article; hence, the purchase of SUN by IBM could help it get more resources. Solaris is also having serious difficulties, even though some of its features are really cool, but I cannot expect IBM to invest in two direct competitors for financial and corporate culture reasons. However, this can be a glory day for the OpenSolaris community, that would finally escape the domination of Sun and be much more independent. The future will tell if they can get it to reach the same level of independence than the Debian project, for instance, without going under.

For Dell, when I wrote they did not own a business-critical line of server, I did not meant they were not able to build critical environments, but just that they only have a product line based on x86 processors, which are not as reliable or scalable as SPARC, POWER or Itanium processors. To add software in their portfolio would have been a smart move, since the last big margins in the IT industry are made with software

Now we know a little more about this merger, especially that Sun folks were even looking for a buyer for their company. As you mentioned, with the money spent into the R&D in the last years, they could have get back the results of their investments, but the crisis and SUN’s dependency on financial accounts have made it weaker for its competitors.

Interesting point with DELL though; although they recently purchased equallogic (SAN business) – which competes directly with SUN’s new storage. I would disagree that they own no business-critical line of servers; although maybe not of the same quality as Suns, they are used on many large and quite critical systems. And Dell has never done software afaik, would have been a huge shift in their strategy. Last but not least DELL hasn’t been doing too well recently, I doubt they have the cash

Very eager to see how IBM would integrate sun, if that purchase was to happen. It’s a sad story as SUN invested huge amounts of money in R&D and is only starting to collect the fruits of that now, with ZFS, dtrace, and their new SANs/Openstorage… My hope was that they would pass 2009, being confident that money would come back after that. We’ll see what happens.