IBM Can Probably Sell Sun Better than Sun Can

An IBM-Sun Microsystems merger would certainly not be all about storage. Or servers. Or cloud computing. Or any other one particular area of IT.

These two Gigantors are far too broad-based for this potential unification to be pinned on any one technology. However, a merger would certainly be about sales and marketing of all of the above.

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When it comes to technology, Sun has the goods: the MySQL database, a good hold on the open-source community, the ultrafast ZFS (Zettabyte File System) for storage, the huge Java franchise, StorageTek disk and tape storage, high-performance servers, some promising solid-state disk storage products, and all that groundbreaking cloud storage software. And that's just the top of it all.

To be clear, IBM has plenty of good technology, too. But it is in marketing, sales and services that IBM holds the clear advantage—very important business ingredients that Sun has lacked for a long, long time.

IBM Global Services' well-oiled organization runs rings around Sun's services group, as it does around just about every competitor's, except perhaps Hewlett-Packard's. Sheer size and reputation have always been the major factors here.

From a business perspective, such a deal looks promising at this early date. Investors at both companies should be excited. Sun's stock was up nearly 80 percent to $9 on March 18, and you can bet it will continue to gain value as these talks intensify. IBM's stock was down a tad, but so what? It's sitting pretty at $91.

In terms of products, there are good fits and big overlaps. Our esteemed eWEEK Labs and some of my other colleagues, including Jeff Burt and Jeff Cogswell, have examined all the pieces closely. There's no question that a combined IBM-Sun entity would be an incredibly formidable competitor for all other systems companies.