Vendors Survival: Sun Microsystems revisited

In July 2008 I published a post in my Vendor Survival series. In the post titled Will SUN Microsystems Survive until 2018? I argued that SUN will not survive and named IBM, HP and EMC as companies which may think of SUN as target for acquisition. It looks like the recession shortened the time frame, and now according to

Bloomberg IBM is in a process of examining acquisition of SUN.

According to Bloomberg, The purchase would give IBM access to customers loyal to the Sun brand.

Bloomberg adds that Sun counts General Electric Co. and General Motors Corp. among its customers. Servers, which run networks and Web sites, account for almost half Sun’s total sales,

General Motors Corp is a company which was heart badly during the recession. No wonder that SUN was also heart and is an immediate acquisition target.

Zdnet's Larry Dignan post states that the acquisition makes sense and it is a question of IBM's acquiring SUN as a company vs. IBM acquiring SUN in parts.

I recommend reading his interesting post.

As you can conclude by reading my first post on SUN survival, I agree with most parts of his analysis. In my view the missing part in his analysis is Java.

Dana Gardner opposed Larry Dignan's view and argues that buying SUN makes no sense for IBM.

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However he thinks of Dell, EMC, RedHat and the new player in servers market Cisco as the only candidates for purchasing SUN. He argues that one of these companies may buy SUN. A reasonable price, according to him is under 4 Billion USDs.

I do not think RedHat, a software vendor, will acquire a hardware vendor like Sun.

Anyway, his opinion is in accord with my prediction that SUN Microsystems will not survive for the Long Term.

Tony Baer's post states that SUN is irrelevant acquisition target for IBM.

He argues that UNIX market is not growing and that IBM does not need MySQL database because of its more scalable DB2 database.

His position is that Fujitsu, SUN's primary Solaris OEM, is the only logical suitor left standing.

IBM's acquisition history does not sustain his view, as far as the Databases market is concerned: IBM acquired Informix and a small Open Source database company.

MYSQL could be positioned as a cheaper alternative to Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle and as an Open Source alternative to commercial databases.