Wednesday, March 18, 2009

IBM may buy Sun for $6.5 Billion

I just read a Bloomberg article (based on reporting from the Wall Street Journal) that IBM May Pay $6.5 Billion to Buy Sun Microsystems.

March 18 (Bloomberg) -- International Business Machines Corp. is in talks to buy Sun Microsystems Inc., the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
IBM may pay at least $6.5 billion, 100 percent more than Sun’s
closing price of $4.97 a share on Tuesday, the report said, citing the people. An agreement may not be reached, the newspaper said.
An acquisition of Sun Microsystems would bolster IBM’s Internet, data storage, government and telecommunications business, the newspaper said, citing the people.
In recent months, Sun Microsystems has contacted a number of technology companies with the aim of being acquired, people familiar with the matter said, according to the newspaper. Hewlett-Packard Co. declined the offer, the newspaper reported, citing a person briefed on the matter.

3 comments:

  1. I can't see a merged company running duplicate lines of hardware OR software, and whichever way it goes, people are going to be pissed. Just look at the HP/Compaq train wreck, and that was relatively mild in comparison (Tru64/HP-UX etc.). With Sun and IBM, they've got to choose between either a massive duplication of effort, or pick one of Solaris/AIX, MySQL/DB2, SPARC/POWER, Galaxy/iSeries, Storagetek (including the ZFS-based products like Thumper/Amber Road)/IBM storage, Websphere/Glassfish, Netbeans/Eclipse - the list goes on.

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  2. IBM: Around 400,000 employees. Sun: 33,000 employees.

    IBM: $104 billion in revenue. Sun: $14 billion.

    IBM: $125 billion market cap. Sun: $3.7 billion

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  3. The NetBeans/GlassFish combo is a killer combination for developing Java EE/J2EE applications. I would hate to see those two products disappear, since they compete directly with Eclipse and Websphere from IBM.

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