IBM to buy Sun, what about Dell?

So, the WSJ is reporting that IBM is in talks to acquire Sun Microsystems for 6.5 billion (a considerable premium on its market valuation).

Some analysis of the news labeled this story red herring, put out there by Sun to get the scare on the real buyer, I tend to agree.

Besides securing Java I don’t understand what IBM gets out of buying Sun.

IBM would be buying a company who’s stack of software/hardware goes head to head with most of IBM’s existing and well established brands. I can’t see this gives IBM anything but a headache and could confuse IBM customers.

For IBM, it would be come an issue of ‘How can you push your high end enterprise hardware/software and its pricing structure against a FOSS stack from your new subsidiary’.  Any FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) they could spread about Sun’s viability and software capability is immediately compromised and they run the real risk of cannibalizing their own sales across a lot of areas.

The second possibility it that its an acquisition focussed on killing off Sun for competitive reasons.  Assuming the regulator has no issue with that (which seems unlikely), then its tacit acknowledgement that Sun strategy is working.  If its working well enough that IBM is wanting to spend $6.5 billion to stop it, why would Sun sell out?

Finally, IBM could be moving to secure Java.  This may only sound practical to Java development community, but with its own JVM and the JDK open sourced most of what I see IBM can bring is their checkbook.  In general spirit, the community is walking, if not running away, from the kind of software ecosystem IBM represents (Eclipse not withstanding) – and surely they could provide that influence a lot cheaper than the cost of acquiring Sun.

What about Dell?

A commenter on one article noted that the real buyer could be Dell and on first glance this seems like a more plausible idea.

Dell is one of the only big names in the desktop/server business which doesn’t have a high end enterprise arm or a software infrastructure stack (the only one I can think of is Lenovo, who I assume still partners strongly with IBM).

Dell is likely already have a presence in the data centers and offices of Sun’s customers via their Laptop/Desktop/Intel servers.

Dell gets the opportunity to sell services across the whole of the data center rack with an enterprise server line + processor architecture, a storage array business, an operating system that can take an organization from the desktop to the cloud and a software stack running the gamut from Operating System to Word Processing (And perhaps in emerging markets like China, this matters).

Sun gets access to a volume sales channel and commodity Intel hardware – something that their software stack could thrive on.

Does that seem more logical to you?