“To be honest, we’ve had a little bit of a chill in our IBM relationship,” said Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s president and chief operating officer.
Despite the chill, and thanks to considerable pressure from Wall Street and other business customers, IBM has agreed to tweak its Websphere and other software products to work on a forthcoming line of new Sun servers.
The technology agreement will see IBM port its middleware products to new x86 servers running Opteron chips from processor maker AMD. Besides Websphere, IBM will provide DB2, Tivoli, and Rational in versions that will run on those new servers.
“Today’s agreement with IBM to extend their commitment to Java technology and to port IBM middleware to Solaris 10 for x86 is a major step forward. Now customers can deploy the applications they want on Solaris 10 and share in this vast opportunity,” said Mr. Schwartz.
“We have been supporting Solaris as an operating system for many years. Recently, we have seen an increase in customer interest in running Solaris on Intel/AMD platforms. Based on that interest, we have decided to port our key middleware products to Solaris 10 on Intel/AMD systems,” said Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive, IBM Software Group.
Businesses like Reuters and the Philadelphia Stock Exchange expressed their approval of the agreement in a press release. Also, IBM and Sun decided to extend their Java licensing agreement for another 10 years.
Sun needed the IBM support in order to better position a new line of servers for large corporations. To that end, Sun encouraged one of its co-founders, Andreas Bechtolsheim, to return to the company as a computer designer.
His design efforts on the upcoming Galaxy computers feature dual-core processors from AMD inside them. Mr. Bechtosheim has been visiting firms and evangelizing the virtues of Sun products.
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
