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Initial Thoughts on IBM Acquisition of Sun Microsystems

The purchase of Sun Microsystems by IBM would be a win for IBM
By Theresa Lanowitz
Article Rating:
March 29, 2009 01:15 PM EDT
Reads:
 18,573

Sun has been in a holding pattern since the dot com implosion. And, while Sun positioned themselves as "the dot in the dot com", that was the last innovation we have seen come from Sun.
 
Sun, while it once had very competitive hardware, had no idea how to productize and implement effective software products.  Sun works on the assumption that all software must lead to Sun server sales - definitely a flawed idea that was proven wrong numerous times.  Sun also was never able to quite grasp the idea of high volume and low margin sales.  Sun continued on in its technology efforts like it was 1988.


 
IBM has clearly demonstrated that it is more than capable of:

  • Being a hardware company
  • Running an effective and profitable professional services business
  • Managing a growing and diverse software portfolio
  • Delighting and maintaining its customer base


IBM has also managed many acquisitions and always seems to find something in an acquisition worthy of continuing on with the IBM brand.
 
The potential of a Sun acquisition by IBM makes sense.  IBM is a world class business organization and will be able to make business sense out of Sun's academic assets.

Published March 29, 2009 – Reads 18,573
Copyright © 2009 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
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More Stories By Theresa Lanowitz

Theresa Lanowitz, Founder of voke, inc. is recognized worldwide as a strategic thinker and market influencer in application lifecycle, virtualization and convergence markets. With over 20 years of experience, Theresa has been associated with some of the most breakthrough technology and products of their time. From 1999 through 2006, Theresa was a research analyst with Gartner. During her tenure with Gartner, Theresa pioneered the application quality ecosystem, championed the application security space, and consistently identified new and emerging companies to watch. As the lead industry analyst for billion dollar plus enterprise software companies such as Mercury, Compuware, and a host of others, Theresa developed marketing and launch strategies, corporate and product messaging, and identified partnering and acquisition opportunities.

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Most Recent Comments
thommym 03/25/09 03:21:00 AM EDT

I must say I don't agree at all with this analysis. Sun has been the constant innovator and brought many new ideas to place. Sun has, as the only big IT company, understod the importance of open source. They have made their superb OS (Solaris) even more outstanding with true innovative features like the ZFS filesystem, the DTrace tracing, and more. They have created astonishing products around it like the openstorage line. So the only sense an IBM takever make is that IBM has to fill up their portfolio with new innovative products.