Who's Ahead in the Unix Wars?
by Dan Olds

Arguably the most competitive system market today is in the Unix server segment. Only three big vendors--Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM--are competing for million-dollar deals in a market that is essentially flat. These factors combine to motivate each vendor to pursue every deal as if it's their last. For customers, it's a bonanza of computational power and sophistication at a very attractive price. It might even be a little bit of fun for some customers who are looking for new systems. READ MORE >

Sun, Oracle Renew Their Vows, Chase Market Share
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Server and operating system maker Sun Microsystems and database, middleware, and application software provider Oracle held a powwow for their employees and members of the press this week in Silicon Valley to renew their vows as partners to one another. Since the IT industry, of necessity, believes in polygamy, the value of such pronouncements of faithfulness is debatable. Sun and Oracle have been mostly partners, sometimes competitors, for two decades, and the fact that they have re-upped a 10-year agreement to work together in various areas may not be surprising, but it is significant. READ MORE >

Utility Computing: Homegrown and Open Source Apps to Get the Last Laugh
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

As 2005 was drawing to a close, there was a lot of activity surrounding a new twist on a very old idea: the compute utility. Well, to be more precise, utilities are an old idea that were perfected during that industrial revolution for water distribution (and other related public water works such as sewage disposal), transportation, energy distribution, and communications. The question that the IT community is pondering is whether it is possible or desirable for there to be a utility or a collection of utilities for data processing, data storage, networking, and collaboration. READ MORE >

Reading the IT Leaves for 2006
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The 2005 IT budget cycle has ended, and the 2006 budget cycle has begun. And that means the prognosticators, predictors, soothsayers, and auguries of the IT analyst community, and their counterparts on Wall Street, are all gazing into their crystal balls and trying to figure out what is going to happen in 2006 in terms of IT spending and technology trends. Some of you will follow trends, others will buck them, but none of us will escape their effects. READ MORE >