Occasionally I say that everything I need to know I learned from the game Civilization (partially in jest). In Civilization, you need to amass a certain amount of resources in order to build things in your various cities (and generate armies). Iron is something you can use to build a number of things. There are other resources you need to be concerned about, of course…
In modern times, in order to be able to sell iron, you need a compelling reason for people to buy it – and corporate wars ensue to end competition to this end. One really great reason is the best threading model on the market; another compelling reason is a great name brand. So if you want to compete with other organizations selling iron, you might want to drop the pretense that AIX is the greatest thing since sliced processing and own up to the fact that Sun’s gotcha’ whipped in the OS market. Albeit a small part of the market compared to what MS has. But Microsoft based operating system aren’t dominant in these high transactional environments that Solaris rules. It’s like comparing apples to oranges (not that Apple iron comes into this equation really).
So why is IBM looking to buy Sun? Iron Wars. With trends to centralized computing, critical assets are moving to the data center. You need a bigger and badder core for these assets, perhaps running on IBM iron. HP, Dell and Sun are all more prevalent in the data center though. Enter Cisco, with their new data center servers. Cisco has more of a footprint in data centers than pretty much anyone else – as such it’s going to be a compelling story for Cisco to take a large market share of high end, high transactional servers. With such a large potential threat, an alliance (or better, a unification) of IBM and Sun will be the biggest competitor to Cisco, with HP and a few other vendors close behind.
But you don’t win Civilization by hoarding only one resource. There’s also databases to think about, and there are a number of prevalent vendors here – MySQL will help to compete with Microsoft SQL and other competitors. Then there are software development tools, with other competitors. And of course, the market that IBM has done best with over the past year: professional services. All of these go into producing the next ingredient to winning a game of Civilization: gold.