Paul Otellini States That Sun Was Shopped Around
Amit Chowdhry | Saturday March 28, 2009 | 905 views| Add a CommentIntel CEO Paul Otellini was on a Webcast earlier this week to discuss the company’s stock options program. The subject of IBM’s interest in Sun came up during the Webcast and Otellini gave his two cents about the Java-producing company. One employee asked Otellini whether Cisco’s entrance to the storage market drove Sun to seek a buyer.
Oh, I don’t know if the Cisco entry spurred IBM. I think (a) cheap Sun price–a low price–spurred a lot of interest. I can tell you that Sun was shopped around the valley and around the world in the last few months. A lot of companies got calls or visits on buying some or all the assets of the company. It looks like IBM is in the hunt now. And at a hundred and some odd percent premium, I suspect they’ll get it.
I don’t think it had anything to do with Cisco. I think IBM is trying to consolidate architectures. IBM has the strongest Java license in the industry. By picking up Sun–which is the creator of Java–they really consolidate their position not just in Linux, but also in Java.
I think the stuff on Solaris and SPARC is likely to see EOLs over time through the IBM acquisition. But no strategic reason for IBM to maintain that except to attempt to convert the very large Sun SPARC Solaris base to power. I think that would be their most likely strategy as part of this.
Is it good or bad for us? I don’t know. I’d rather have Sun be independent, I guess.
Those statements were published on an SEC filing on Wednesday.
It will be interesting to see who does end up buying Sun or if are forced to compete directly against Cisco. Whoever ends up buying Sun will end up owning MySQL too. MySQL is an integral part of today’s web technologies.
[via CNET]
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