Alliance and joint
agreement between Sun and Intel is now a done deal. The announcement
made yesterday had caused some stir throughout the IT industry. Some
of us may wonder what is the big deal about it. To some, this doesn't
mean a thing. To some, this could mean choices, variety, and new line
of cool products that will be coming out soon. To a few, including
me, this could mean possibility of many new innovation. Here's what I think could result from the impact of the deal:
To Sun
Sun will gain
significant benefit from Intel adopting Solaris OS, Netbeans, and
Java. This will lead to exploration and innovation of Sun technology
based on Intel platform. It would be interesting to see how Solaris
performs on Intel Xeon processor. For sure, Sun will add more
offerings to its server product line. Sun could possibly gain
significant momentum in both server and desktop market. Marketing,
OEM, and support from Intel will help distribute Solaris to many user
groups. Java technology will gain benefit from Intel technology as
well and follows by more adoption from users and developers. The
impact of agreement with Intel was already evident from Apple's case
when it smacked a deal with Intel. More users have turned to Mac since its adoption of Intel chips. Whether it would be the same for Sun or
not, we will have to wait and see.
To Intel
Intel will get a
hand on Solaris, the most advanced operating system on the planet.
Working with Sun engineers and Solaris community, Intel will get a
chance to incorporate its products with many of Solaris innovative
features; such as, Dtrace, Virtualization, ZFS File system, Predictive self healing, and etc. Intel could also possibly expand its
mobile device market and offerings by supporting Java technology that
is running on more than 6 billions devices around the world. Intel
will also get exposure to Sun's existing customers. Intel will likely
be able to snatch more market share from its major rival, Advanced
Micro Device, who has been dominating Sun server market.
To the world
Sun and Intel
engineers are renowned for their technical prowess and ability to
innovate. We will for sure see interesting new things coming out as
results of the deal. Another party that I believe will benefit
significantly is open source community. Sun is currently the world
number one open source contributor and seems to continue to be number
one for years ahead. It is likely that many new cool things resulting
from the deal will be distributed to the open source community. I'm
glad to hear that Intel will also support Solaris, Java, and Netbeans
communities. So far, most of open source community seem to be
concentrate on Software and majority of people are Software
developers. As a member of the community myself, it would be cool to
see more input from the hardware side, especially major player like
Intel.
Cheers for both Sun and Intel !!
