I am kind of excited that IBM has a bid on the table to buy SUN. Finally Sun can stop their search for a buyer. Sun has a lot to offer that IBM can use. From a hardware perspective, they will have Sun servers and from a UNIX platform, they can add a lot of Solaris customers to their bag and eventually migrate them to AIX. But, I am not sure, how much hardware really matters to IBM, as the margins in that business are pretty slim as such.
BTW, my topic of interest – SOA and Integration: What would they do with Sun's JCAPS (from SeeBeyond). I really like that product offering from Sun. But, IBM has competing and well established WebSphere Integration toolset. Similarly, there are a lot of competing infrastructure offerings from both these players in the middleware space like the app server and the portal. I wonder what IBM would do with some of these things from Sun. I hate to see some of them fade away, though.
Most importantly, IBM would benefit from the silicon-valley innovation that Sun brings to the table. Not that IBM is short of any innovation internally, but the more the merrier. This buyout is certainly an interesting thing to watch out.. Let's see how this panes out.
Cheers,
