I’ve been saying for some time that something is going to happen with Sun. They’re too awesome to wallow in mediocrity. Now, IBM might be buying Sun for $6.5 Billion. Sun shares are up (drastically), IBM shares down. This merger is hard to imagine. To me, Sun is a great company that is like a boat without a rudder. They are entrenched in the open source movement, with their purchase of MySQL, but have not shown that they can reconcile other corporate cultures into their own. It’s hard to imagine that things will be different with integrating their own corporate culture into that of IBM.
But Sun has a vast portfolio, some of which overlaps with IBM, that can provide value. At the root of this is Solaris, which to me, is the best operating system around for high transaction needs. Sun is also behind Java and MySQL, a compelling development paradigm that clashes with many of the solutions IBM currently offers. Sun can sell Storage Area Networks and tape libraries, which is a great addition to the IBM portfolio.
Overall, the guys brokering this deal are simply going to be smarter than me. If it makes sense then they’ll pull the trigger and finalize the deal; otherwise they will kill it. If it does go through it will be very interesting to see how a Sun + IBM deal can result in a greater overall entity if it happens.