Just some silly thoughts, I know.
What would make sense for IBM to keep from a Sun acquisition?
- Java. IBM hates Microsoft. Keeping Java keeps MS out of a serious bunch of business.
- Installed base. Sun has been the shining star in entry-level Unix deployments, Telcos, and,
when it comes to open systems in general, in the financial industry.
Sun has by far the biggest number of applications available on Solaris.
Most likely bigger then the sum of apps on AIX and HP-UX.
More or less as an experiment, Solaris tuns today already on Mainframes (zSeries) and
Unix machines (pSeries).
So why not enable Solaris to run on pSeries within an lpar, next to an AIX lpar, next to an i-OS lpar..?
This could definitely keep some Solaris customers on IBM Hardware.
And the migration from Sparc to Power would be good business for Global Services.
- MySQL? Maybe. just some sort of "DB2-lite" for the OpenSource community.
What IBM would dump:
- Sparc. Design and manufacturing of processors is a quite expensive thing to do,
and not under all circumstances profitable.
- Storage, x86 based Servers, Tape-Libraries, basically all hardware stuff.
The idea of Oracle and HP bidding together for Sun made no sense at all.
Biggest value from Sun is in software. This would have gone to Oracle.
All the hardware: hp would have stopped it immediately, since in most cases,
hp has equal or better offerings.
(Aside from Itanium... Rock would definitely have been a thing to look at..)
So hp would be left with the faith to "own" the installed base. Lol..
And, as usual (Wang, Apollo, Dec/Tru64, just to name a few) they'd throw away or ignore any
software-related technology that fell into their hands.
Including the customer base that bought those products because of the technology..