HP and Sun have become partners| 26.02.2009
On Wednesday, Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems announced a new partnership agreement under which HP will sell and support operating system Sun Solaris on their ProLiant servers and
blade systems.
Thus, for example, a much larger player in the server market, will be able to offer customers yet another operating system, and Sun will get wide distribution network for its software. Analysts
consider the transaction risky for the Sun, but the management of both companies believes in its feasibility. Customers before could exploit Solaris on HP servers, but had to buy equipment from
one company and software from another. From the Sun has similar agreements with IBM, Dell and other equipment manufacturers, and HP — similar distribution agreements with other
suppliers of operating systems such as Windows and Linux.
According to the latest data from IDC, in the fourth quarter of last year, HP took the second place in sales of servers in the world after IBM and sold them at $3.9 billion, corresponding to 29% of the market. Meanwhile, Sun
takes fourth place behind Dell, with sales of $1.3 billion and 9% of the market. However, in the segment of x86 servers, which includes servers in the ProLiant family, HP is leading with 38% of the world market, while
Sun in this segment is ranked fifth with only 2.6% of the market, although demonstrating the strongest growth.
The deal is aimed at customers who would like to replace old servers Sun x86 modern models or who prefer to use for their mission-critical applications possible
Solaris. From HP has its own operating system based on Unix, but it focuses on other families of servers.
Sun gets most of its revenue from hardware, but in essence, is, rather, a software company than a provider of servers. According to the Sun, in the fourth quarter, operating systems
Unix (excluding Linux) became the largest income segment of the market, pushing the Windows on the second place.
