Fate of Sun's Products Up in the Air

With rumors of an impending Sun-IBM merger becoming more intense late last week, the next big question mark pertains to what happens to Sun's vast product line, which has hardware and software that overlaps with a lot of IBM's own product lines. Observers -- including a former Sun employee, a former software developer for the Sun platforms, and the founder of the Ruby on Rails Web framework -- maintain varying perspectives on what to expect and offer degrees of both optimism and pessimism about the whole endeavor.

By By Paul Krill
Mon, April 06, 2009

InfoWorld — With rumors of an impending Sun-IBM merger becoming more intense late last week, the next big question mark pertains to what happens to Sun's vast product line, which has hardware and software that overlaps with a lot of IBM's own product lines. Observers -- including a former Sun employee, a former software developer for the Sun platforms, and the founder of the Ruby on Rails Web framework -- maintain varying perspectives on what to expect and offer degrees of both optimism and pessimism about the whole endeavor.

A look at the two vendors' product lines reveals overlaps in areas such as chip architectures, with IBM offering its Power processor family and Sun the Sparc RISC processor. In the database realm, IBM has its core DB2 platform while Sun acquired the open source MySQL database in 2008. Both have sold desktop and server systems and have participated in dueling open source tools initiatives for the Java platform, with Sun driving the NetBeans platform and IBM launching the Eclipse platform, which has been spun out into an independent initiative.

[ Does the proposed acquisition mean the end for Sun? See how Sun's journey brought it into IBM's reach in InfoWorld's "Reporter's Notebook: Sundown for Sun?" ]

But both companies have been heavily involved in projects such as Java and open source, so while there are conflicts in their product lines, there are synchronicities as well.

"I think [a merger] would make a stronger case for use of open source software, particularly at the infrastructure level," says Tony Wasserman, executive director of the Center for Open Source Investigation, which is part of Carnegie Mellon University Silicon Valley. Wasserman was the founder and CEO of Interactive Development Environments (IDE), which provided a modeling tool running on both IBM and Sun workstations. "I was one of Sun's first ISVs [independent software vendors]," he notes.

The founder of the open source Ruby on Rails Web framework, David Heinemeier Hansson, expressed apprehension about the proposed merger: "I think it's pretty rare to see that technology actually improves post-big mergers, so I remain skeptical," Hansson says "But on the other hand, I'd rather see Sun's assets picked up by IBM than going down the drain. So I guess it might be the least-bad outcome of the possibilities available."

"I think if I'm a Sun customer, I'm happy" about the proposed merger, says Matthew Eastwood, group vice president for enterprise platform research at IDC. That's because IBM's apparent interest throws them a life preserver to Sun users have a lot invested in the technology at a time when Sun has "sort of sent the message to the market that they can't [survive] now," he says.

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