AIX and HP-UX Are Dead Unixes? Shy or Demure, Perhaps, But Dead?

Published: January 26, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

During Sun Microsystems' conference call with Wall Street analysts going over the company's latest financial results, Sun president and chief operating officer, Jonathan Schwartz, gave a brief characterization of the state of the Unix market. He called IBM's AIX and Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX "dead Unixes."

No, that is not the name of a grunge band, but The Dead Unixes does have an apocalyptic ring to it that makes it sound like one. Schwartz went on to explain that these Unixes were dead in two different ways. First, they are tied to their respective Power and Itanium platforms (yes, I know you can still get HP-UX for PA-8800s and PA-8900s), while Sun has embraced X86, X64, and Sparc platforms for its Solaris Unix variant. (If you want to be fair, most of the old guard at Sun did not apparently want to do this, and they pulled the plug on Solaris for X86 support to better peddle Sparc/Solaris a few years ago when times got tough for Sun. Which explains why there is a new guard, including Schwartz, running Sun these days.) He also asserted that these Unixes are dead because they are closed source and under the tight control of IBM and HP.

Each quarter, IBM ships around 30,000 AIX licenses on pSeries servers and HP ships around 20,000 HP-UX licenses on Integrity and HP 9000 platforms (mostly Integrity these days). While these numbers are dwarfed by the 100,000 or so Solaris licenses that Sun ships on servers it makes--and are utterly dwarfed by the approximately 1 million Solaris 10 downloads Sun saw each quarter in the past year, "dead" is a funny way of describing AIX and HP-UX. IBM's Unix server revenue grew 14 percent in calendar 2005, Sun's was down by around 4 to 5 percent. Even HP has turned around its problematic Unix server business and was seeing revenue growth again (albeit a smaller amount than IBM) in the last two quarters of 2005.

IBM and HP might be more shy about their Unixes, they may be more reserved about the necessity to go open source than Sun (which has more to prove, to put it bluntly), but dead? I don't think so. Sun no doubt wishes it could be dead like this again, as it was in the late 1990s.