Sun Broadens Migration Offerings for Solaris Platforms
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

For years and years, the big three Unix players have had competitive replacement programs in place so they could chase the disgruntled customers in their competitors' bases with cheaper servers and software and migration services to help them make the jump. While the number of customers who make such platform jumps are small, over the course of a year, hundreds of millions of dollars in deals go down. Of course, it is best to migrate your own vintage installed base as well as chase competitors, and that is what Sun Microsystems is doing with the Enterprise Migration Suite announced this week. READ MORE >

Cost Controls Boost IBM Earnings on Flat Q1 Revenues
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

If this were a decade ago, and IT industry juggernaut IBM told Wall Street that its mainframe business was off 6 percent, its proprietary midrange server business was off 22 percent, its Unix server business was off 9 percent, its services business was off 1 percent, and its software business was only up 3 percent, Big Blue would have had its corporate head handed to it. But, this is 2006, and what matters more than revenue growth for the largest IT company in the world is improving profits, which IBM did manage to get in the first quarter of 2006. READ MORE >

HP Brags about Integrity Sales in Asia/Pacific
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

In the server racket, you go where the growth is, you play to your strengths, and if your competition is falling behind in any way, you rub it in. Hewlett-Packard has taken more than its share of in-rubbing since its merger with Compaq five years ago, but with the ProLiant X64 business humming along and its Itanium-based Integrity server line growing, it is now HP's turn to rub it in a little. READ MORE >

Oracle's Ellison Ponders Owning a Linux Distro; Why Not BSD?
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

I don't know from personal experience, but I suspect that when you are rich, you might have a tendency to think that you can buy yourself out of any trouble and into any opportunity. If you are rich enough, and your friends are rich enough, that brings a lot more power to bear, and you can shape the political arguments or businesses and the markets they play in. This must be what it is like to be Larry Ellison, founder and chairman of Oracle, and the other titans of the IT industry. READ MORE >