IBM and Sun ink OS Deal

It´s not the “IBM kicks AIX” deal i hoped for, although there are some small hints (Who wants AIX when there is a Solaris on the plattform ;) ). But the deal is nearly as good as a “We kick it” message would be. With this annoucement IBM wins a decent operating system for their xSeries (perhaps for zSeries and pSeries, but honestly, i don´t believe in usable code anytime soon), we win something more important: With IBM another Tier1 supplier (other then ourself) backs our Solaris x86 story. Better story, more ISV support for the x86 variant of Solaris. And from now on, nobody can talk about Solaris x86 as a niche.Solaris 10 gains momentum everyday. A good article about this agreement is available at the Register: IBM embraces - wtf - Sun’s Solaris across x86 server line - of course beside of the bullshit of this GCG analyst. Such development places Solaris x86 in a good position to compete with Linux. Or as Ashlee states it:

Solaris x86 enjoys a relatively small but devoted developer community. The Linux crowd seems to have taken notice of this with zealots bashing Solaris x86 at every chance during recent open source trade shows. Such concern is understandable given that Solaris offers a number of high-end features not found with Linux. (Note to self: Start flame war.)

and

IBM's support for Solaris x86 could give the developer community a real boost, since Big Blue opens up a broader market. In addition, IBM's move appears to confirm that there is strong demand for the OS among corporate customers. It's hard to imagine IBM agreeing to this arrangement without customers applying serious pressure.

PS: I don´t like analysts and the media gives them a stage that is largely oversized for their blurbs. And most often they seem to be single people analyst shops. As far as i memorize, i don´t remeber a GCG analyst blurb from someone different than Dan Olds. Sometimes those people raise my suspicion, that they are hired to make some marketing statements, when you aren´t able to make this statement on your own.