IBM Ink Drying in the Sun?

Chris Preimesberger over at eWeek is reporting that the IBM acquisition of Sun for the bargain basement price of $6.5 billion is almost definitely a go and could be announced today or Monday. Writes Chris:

“All the indicators point one way: The acquisition of one of the most innovative, risk-taking and open-source-minded IT companies in the world, Sun Microsystems, by the world’s oldest and arguably largest IT corporation, IBM, is a done deal. All that remains is for the ink on the legalese to dry. That’s what several eWEEK sources are telling us.”

Meanwhile, the commentary on what this will mean continues to pour out in the blogosphere. Beth Pariseau’s recent post on StorageSoup raises questions about the shakeout sure to result from the OEM deals IBM has made with vendors, particularly NetApp with the IBM N-Series. Considering the lawsuits between NetApp and Sun over ZFS, a merger seems tricky at best. After laying out some possiblilities, Beth asks:

“Are any of those scenarios particularly palatable, especially for customers who are invested in IBM’s N-series precisely because it has the IBM brand associated with it, and therefore ostensibly an assurance that IBM would stand behind that product?”

Meanwhile, Matthew Sarrel in another eWeek column is parting ways with much of the crowd by arguing that the acquisition is “all about storage.” Oh, really? Yes, argues Sarrel–between the StorageTek asset and Sun’s homegrown Storage 7000 Unified Storage System, OpenSolaris and Open Portfolio, IBM could win back its piece of the migration puzzle.

Two of the best bloggers in the biz, Storagezilla and Storagebod weighed in with posts this week that run counter to some of this. For example, Storagezilla argues the Solaris is actually a liability of the merger, because:

“IBM’s cash rich pSeries division is an AIX stronghold with IBM’s numerous attempts to kill AIX and replace it with Linux having all failed. With Linux being pushed hard on xSeries hardware, on the Mainframe and even on pSeries where does Solaris settle? The answer is that it doesn’t.”

Storagebod has a slightly different take on this with his assertion that most likely Solaris will survive the merger. Update: reread this and realized he is agreeing with Storagezilla on Solaris. He writes:

“Yes IBM will have to kill products and at least one sacred cow will have to go; AIX or Solaris. That’s a hard one to call. Solaris on pSeries would be an interesting proposition but I suspect AIX will survive; it’ll pick up some technologies from Solaris, ZFS for example. And if Solaris goes; where does that leave Sparc?”

Phew. Seems like the whole thing is raising more questions than it’s answering–and it could be months or even longer before we see what happens to the IBM-Sun (or, as Beth Pariseau has dubbed it “SunBM”) product line. Many geeks are obviously rooting for a continuation of the open source path that Sun has been heading down, but really it is early days yet. The ink, in fact, is not dry–and as we saw with some recent bank mergers, you just never do know.

Of course, many have been wondering about the cultural fit between the ponytails and the suit wearers. Though if you look at this recent video on his blog, you can see that Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz has both a ponytail and a suit. So, perhaps all will be fine–the IBMers can grow their hair (or perhaps cut it if they’re women?) and the Sun folks can start putting ties over their t-shirt/bermuda shorts ensembles.

By the way, I think I might get booed by one or more of my fellow storage tweeters for the headline on this post, but I couldn’t resist–I grew up in a household of punsters, and then (mis)spent many years in the news biz. May the groans commence.