Do Big Blue Skies Mean Shorter and Shorter Days
for Sun?
By Jim Balderston
IBM announced
today that it has expanded its efforts to convince and support customers who are
seeking to migrate from Solaris operating environments to Linux-based
solutions with new migration tools, educational seminars, and porting guides.
The Solaris to Linux migration effort will be
comprised of the following components available on a worldwide basis
beginning in June:
◊
IBM
Migration Factory Linux Assessments for qualifying customers at no charge.
◊
IBM
Migration Factory for Linux including Solaris C/C++ to IBM
Linux Porting and Oracle Database Migration Services.
◊
The Linux at IBM
competitive advantage Web site.
◊
Solaris to Linux Seminars.
◊
Solaris on SPARC to Linux x86 Porting Guide
◊
Solaris to Linux on Power Roadmap/Porting
Guide
◊
A thirty-five city road show focused on
Solaris to Linux on OpenPower
◊
Solaris to Linux Seminars for IBM
business partners to use in discussion migration issues with their customers.
◊
Two-day Solaris to Linux migration classes for
Open Power and xSeries business partners.
◊
A Solaris to Linux sales kit for business partners.
Net/Net
IBM noted that
it is making this move now because a significant part of Sun’s installed base
is getting older and will soon be in need of upgrades; a message Sun is
apparently giving its own customers in an attempt to move them up to Solaris
10. That Sun’s installed base is getting threadbare is not really in dispute:
the company’s largest single year of sales was in 2000, and it has continued
to lose market share and sales engagements since that year. IBM
is also well positioned to take advantage of this Winter Solstice, with
greater Linux server share than HP or Dell, and with more than 360 middleware
products running on Linux as well as 6,000 applications ported to the
operating environment. The company has 12,000 Linux engagements around the world
and has already completed more than 3,000 Solaris to Linux migrations to
date.
Overall market share of Linux installations
continues to rise, with revenue growth and unit growth both above 50%, and
with Linux revenue topping $1 billion for the fifth consecutive quarter at a
nearly $1.6 billion for the last quarter alone. IBM
also notes that Linux revenue growth is seven times that of any other server
platform and that only the AIX version of UNIX is growing at all, by virtue
of its steady revenue state in an otherwise declining market.
When Linux first began making noise in the market,
many speculated that it would do the most harm to the market share of Windows
servers, based largely on the quasi-religious nature of the open source vs.
proprietary software models. While Linux revenue is growing much faster than
that of Windows-based servers, the Microsoft product still holds a commanding
4:1 revenue edge in 2004 figures. However, back when Linux was being
positioned as a Windows killer, we argued that it was UNIX that faced the
greatest threat from the nascent Linux movement and reality has validated
this in spades. Both Solaris and HP-UX have been losing market share and
Sun’s 40% drop in server revenues since 2000 indicate that a significant
amount of that leakage is moving to Linux offerings.
In this market environment, we see that IBM
has pushed Linux at all sectors of the market. The fact that IBM
believes a huge segment of the Linux market is in the SMB space is demonstrated
by its offering business partners and ISVs the opportunities to sell Solaris
to Linux migration and providing them with tools and sales collateral, as
well as substantial training opportunities. This is clearly a company putting
its money where its press releases and mouth are. Given that business
partners and ISVs own the relationships and expertise with SMBs, IBM’s
efforts to avoid distant vendor sales pitches makes perfect sense. The smart
path is to let those who own the customer relationship make the calls and
equip them with the tools and revenue opportunities to generate success. IBM
continues to make the case that it is going after small business
opportunities with much more than marketing fluff or smoke and mirrors. The
Solaris to Linux migration effort is the latest evidence of this SMB push,
and if successful, threatens to make Sun reach a near permanent state of
Winter Solstice in the coming years.
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