Sunday, April 05, 2009

assertTrue( ): What Sun means to IBM

assertTrue( ): What Sun means to IBM: "Three things, I think. First, a customer list to sell into (for servers, storage, cloud services). That's the obvious one.

The second thing IBM gets by buying Sun (something I don't see many people talking about) is that nobody else gets to buy Sun. Certain IBM competitors who really do stand to benefit from a Sun purchase (e.g., Cisco) are denied easy entry into some of IBM's markets, if Big Blue takes Sun out.

A third thing IBM gets is 7000 patents. Not all of those patents are still active, and around 1600 were donated to open source a few years ago. But it's still a sizable portfolio. And we do know that IBM likes patents an awful lot."

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