Its still feels pretty darned weird to be here at a Sun gig watching a video of Intel CEO Paul Otellini endorsing Solaris. It was funny – Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz got them to rewind the video a couple of times to see the line from Otellini: “Intel is embracing Solaris”.
The deal is quite deep. Sun will sell Intel servers. Intel will distribute and support Solaris (a new whitebox channel opportunity. Intel is going to pay Sun money for engineering work.
Jonathan says only three operating systems are showing real growth at the moment- Solaris, Linux and Windows. He has a point. Sun and Intel now have decent stories for all three, although I am pretty skeptical about customers deploying Windows on Sun servers. I will try and find out some more about that while I am here. That has to be a major growth opportunity for Sun, in that its a huge market the company has never seriously embraced.
Comedy? Sure. But its a lot easier to laugh when you’re in the black.
People Over Process » Blog Archive » SAS07 - Trip Report, Suite Dreams, More than Java, Fine Glass Cups, and The Battle Against Punk IT says:
February 14, 2007 at 12:23 am
[…] Clearly, Sun’s recognized that that they can’t continue selling high-high end servers only, as, for example, the recent partnership with Intel and the continuing one with AMD shows. To me, the story for Sun hardware is: “sure, Dell is cheap, but we don’t fail.” To that end, I often wonder if it’s worth the time to turn up the “nasty dial” a bit about Dell and other “low-end” options for servers. […]