Sun Just Wants To Get Along
With its days of getting into verbal shoving matches with its archrivals in
the rear-view mirror, Sun Microsystems now appears to be a company that would
rather shake hands with its competitors -- even with once-bitter rival Microsoft.
In yet another noteworthy win for the Wintel Duopoly, Sun recently
deepened its alliance with Redmond, signing a deal that will see the company
build x64-based servers with Windows Server 2003 tightly bundled in. No longer
will Sun users have to separately purchase and install the server-based operating
system on their own.
The deal extends Microsoft's reach even further into the rather profitable
server world because it now has direct access to Sun's users. According to figures
from IDC, Sun remains the planet's third-largest supplier of servers with a
13 percent share of the worldwide market, behind IBM and Hewlett-Packard. Hardly
chump change.
"This latest collaboration [between Sun and Microsoft] reflects the demands
of the company's joint customers, the increasing pragmatism of the vendor's
respective leadership teams, and the growing maturity of the IT marketplace,"
said Dwight Davis, vice president of Ovum Summit. "With Sun noting that
100 percent of its Solaris customers use Windows, it only makes sense for the
two vendors to ramp up their cooperation on some fronts, even as they continue
to battle one another across a wide range of products and markets."
The announcement also helps the companies nudge their respective virtualization
strategies along. They each pledged to ensure their operating systems would
work and play well with the other's key virtualization technologies. This could
prove to be yet another important boost for Microsoft as it tries to climb higher
in the data center, where an increasing number of IT shops are looking at consolidating
older servers to simplify operations and reduce energy costs.
Posted by Ed Scannell on September 13, 2007