IBM has offered Windows based solution, then Linux solution, Novell solution, and now it also offers Solaris solution. This is of course marked the true separation of Sun's hardware business and its Solaris operating system business (now earns mostly from support!), a path that Sun has chosen years ago. Jon Schwartz has stated in his blog that August 16th, 2007 was the milestone for the separation.
Actually Solaris has run on high end hardware other than Sun's, but still in the SPARC architecture circle (such as Fujitsu high end servers).
Now Solaris runs a business model pretty much similar to the RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), competing head-to-head to it, and has the advantage of being positioned as high end operating system lowering down to earth, while RHEL was positioned (at least by community) as hacker operating system trying to go up to become high end platform.
As far as I can remember, Sun also run its StarOffice business under the same business model. So I think this business model is nothing new to Sun.
It will be most likely that other x86 based hardware major vendors (HP/Compaq, Dell, Fujitsu, etc) will join the bandwagon, but IBM has had the advantage of being one to catch the first wave. Now users will have other choice instead of using Windows, Linux, and Novell.
No comments:
Post a Comment