IBM in talks to buy SUN

Well not two days after I say how their cloud innovations may be too late in coming for SUN... now IBM is in talks to purchase them. How very interesting.

This potential deal is interesting on multiple fronts.

• RISC (Not Risk as in risky but RISC as in Reduced Instruction Set Computer) This potential merger creates a big home for the remaining non-Intel chip guys. While HP does have their own this combination of fanatical Sun worshipers and the IBM "tried and true"ers is a potentially strong combo. Very different audiences and users though with one driven by tech innovation in Sun users and the other in the "never been fired for picking IBM" mentality.
• Java - Not a lot of the press on the topic brought this up. I guess because it is a shared standard and all that rigmarole. The reality though is that Sun still drives Java in a lot of ways. IBM on the other hand has been a big Java pusher on multiple fronts for development tools, open source etc. This could be a big deal. Of course there is always the gotcha side of the new languages such as SCALA coming up in popularity for the many-core problem.
• Open Source - Sun was big big in the .com era and went down when the .com boom went up. Since then they pushed into Open Source fairly successfully and actually have several software products that they are responsible for that have decent success. Grid, MySQL, even Solaris (a religion among some by itself) are big software assets. Of course the hard part is that IBM has their own efforts in these areas.
• People Logistics - If Sun has an office somewhere, so does IBM. The overhead portion of this could be a big savings opportunity. Not geeky though so I will stop there.
• Competition - Some of the press has stated this is a response to Cisco's entry into the data center space for servers. I doubt that but it does narrow down the big data center players. HP, IBM... ... well...

All told I think this could be good for Sun and IBM. If done right. (isn't that always the trick though... if it works everyone is a genius if it doesn't they were doomed from the get-go.) It gives me some hope for these products and companies for the future and in any case it will be fun to watch.