Hell has frozen and it’s beautiful…. Sun and Microsoft announce deeper alliance
Sun and Microsoft form deeper alliance – but things were not this rosy, and not too long ago in my past life when we were consolidating massive datacenters of a large financial institution from IBM (AS400 and e-series) class servers to a Dell + Compaq (HP) WinTel platform and SUN e29000s mix.
We always admired SUN’s hardware reliability (though a bit pricy) as well as their great platinum support SLA (also comes with a sticker shock) and therefore we pushed Sun to seek ways of providing their hardware and its reliability to run Windows commodity workloads. We were told that it will be a cold day in hell when that happens…. 7 years and two months later the hell has indeed become a cold place J
Profile:-
Sun and Microsoft has traditionally competed on everything and anything – well, starting from the OS (Solaris ‘Server and Workstation), Platform Management + Virtualization, App Plat (Java, JVM, JiNi) and recently on the business productivity with StarOffice (open source platform competes against MS Office)
The Antitrust war over JVM (Java Virtual Machine) and MSJVM right to be bundled in Windows made things worst and a major source of pain for the customers, who would liked better interoperability.
So what made the hell freeze?
Two words “market share”… Sun has been losing on all fronts, on platform with Microsoft and Linux and even to IBM mainframe. On App-Plat against .Net (VSTS), BEA (Web Logic), IBM (Eclipse, WebSphere), Oracle and Google (AJAX and APIS) etc in fact the stock price is indicative of this demise - on its heyday close to $80 and now a bare $5.50
10 Year Char for Sun Microsystem Stock Performance
So back in April 2004, Steve Ballmer and Scott McNealy shook hands and Microsoft also cut a check to Sun for nearly $2 billion and another several billions in soft dollar infusion, the end result – Sun would stop its litigations against Microsoft on MSJVM and its distribution and instead focus on interoperability in the field of web 2.0 technologies and platform support and management….
How it might help customers
1. Sun has a great hardware platform (Sun Fire series 64 bit) and Windows Server offering on this platform is great news for the customers
2. Sun is also emerging as a big player on the whole ‘Green Computing’ turf and can help customers deploy Windows while reducing their carbon footprint
3. Interoperability on Virtualization – Windows virtual instances running as guests on Sun Solaris host OS and vice versa
4. Interoperability on Management – Ability to manage Windows Server and client from Sun Central Datacenter suite and vice versa
5. MSJVM (Java Virtual Machine) – perhaps return of MSJVM in Windows Vista SP1, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008.
In upcoming weeks we will post more info on the key benefits of this annoucement
