Deep Purple

Fuel is almost constantly being added to the story that IBM is in talks to buy Sun, one of the latest being the Intel CEO weighing in on the IBM-Sun Talks. If it happens, some will no doubt be sad to see Sun go, and having been involved in the purchase and implementation of a small number of Sun boxes over the years, I've a bit of grá for the company myself.

But business is business. Sun suffered after the dot com bust, not least due to the shift to Linux on generic x86 hardware, which was cheaper than buying a SPARC based system to run Solaris - which was all the rage when there was plenty of VC cash being sloshed around and spent recklessly. Sun responded with OpenSolaris - but too late.

It's no surprise to read Jonathan Schwartz (Sun's CEO) blogging about their market potential, open source and their new cloud initiative in his recent post. Given IBM's relationship with open source and cloud computing, it'll be interesting to see what they do with Sun if they make the purchase.

Assuming the deal goes through, they'll have to have a project called Deep Purple. It's too good a naming opportunity to be missed.

B