Market Agog With Reports Of IBM Buying Sun

There is no official confirmation yet, nor are the two companies’ websites saying anything, but the market is agog with reports over IT biggie IBM aiming to take over Sun. The stock prices of Sun have already zoomed skywards with this news.

Santa Clara, California-based Sun Microsystems Inc is in multiple IT businesses of Servers and workstations based on its proprietary SPARC architecture, storage systems, a suite of software products such as the Solaris Operating system, developer tools, web infrastructure software, and identity management applications. Sun is the developer behind the Java technology.

The company has a market capitalization of USD 3.56 billion as of 2009, and it had reported a net income of USD 403 million with about USD 13.9 billion revenue in FY 08. The company has over 33,000 employees on its payroll, and ranks 184 in the Fortune 500 list, as of 2008.

Armonk, New York-based IBM Corporation on the other hand is a much bigger organization with net income of USD 12.3 billion generated from revenue of USD 103.6 billion in 2008. The company has about 400,000 employees on its payroll as of 2008.

IBM’s main attraction towards taking over Sun is said to be its low prevailing share price, and its strong foothold in domains such as web infrastructure and cloud computing.

Read more about market rumors about the possible takeover by IBM of Sun, here.

Sun Premiers JavaFX Mobile At Mobile World Congress Today

Santa Clara, California-based Sun Microsystems Inc will premier the JavaFX Mobile platform at the ongoing Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, today.

This platform enables the Java wireless ecosystem to create internet-rich solutions. The broadest possible range of mobile devices – from mass market feature phones to smart phones can be addressed seamlessly by applications developed on the JavaFX. The product is now competing head-on with the likes of Android, Windows Mobile and Symbian.

The JavaFX platform has found support from the world’s leading mobile operators and device manufacturers. That companies in the mobile application software domain have embraced the platform, is apparent from the list compiled by Sun (here: http://javafx.com/partners/). The underlying Java platform itself is available on more than 2.6 billion phones in the form of Java ME. Developers therefore get to use the new technology to access the phone-specific features of the underlying Java ME, such as address book, Bluetooth, camera, location services, and the like.

Besides the Mobile, JavaFX as a platform is available across other devices also, such as the desktop and the browser. A powerful scripting language in the platform enables diverse features such as hi-fi audio and video, rich text, vector graphics, animation and web services etc to be embedded in applications.

 

Read more about the latest launch from Sun, here.

Sun Announces Q2 2009 Results

Santa Clara, California-based Sun Microsystems Inc has reported results for Q2 2009.

The company has reported revenue of USD 3.2 billion for the quarter that ended in December 2008. This is 11% less than what the company reported for Q2 of 2008, but is 8% more than Q1 of 2009. Gross margin touched USD 1.35 billion, which is again 23% less than the gross margin in Q2 2008, but 12% more than in Q1 2009. There was net loss of USD 209 million in this quarter for the company. This loss is still better than the huge loss of USD 1.7 billion that the company suffered in Q1 2009.

Amongst its businesses, Sun has witnessed a healthy growth of sales in Solaris-based chip multi-threading systems by 31% compared to Q2 2008. Software billings too has grown by 21% from Q1 and Q2 of 2008.

In Q2 2009, Sun has introduced some major groundbreaking innovations in the market, such as the SPARC Enterprise T5440 server, the Sun Unified Storage System christened 7000 Family (aka “Amber Road”), JavaFX 1.0 platform for RIA, Sun xVM Virtual Box virtualization software, the Jave SE 6 Update 10 platform for desktops, an Identity Compliance Manager for risk management, and participated in the AEGIS project to address accessibility issues.

 Read more about Sun’s latest financial performance report, here.

Sun Commits To Long-Term Java Support For SAP Customers

Santa Clara, California-based Sun Microsystems Inc has made a long-term commitment of 15 years to support a version of Java – Java SE for Business – for all customers using the SAP NetWeaver technology platform.

Java SE for Business version is used for business-critical Java SE applications. Usually, a product has an expiry tag after which the vendor withdraws all support. Sun has, with its multi-year agreement with SAP, instilled confidence in the minds of SAP customers, thus ensuring longevity and loyalty amongst SAP clientele.

SAP NetWeaver is a service-oriented application and integration platform and provides the development and runtime environment for SAP applications, and it is also used for custom development and integration with other applications and systems. The product has been built with industry de facto standards. It is to the credit of SAP’s strategy that system integrators and ISVs are building applications that are “Powered by SAP NetWeaver”. By committing to a long-term support, Sun seeks to leverage SAP’s popularity for Java SE.

The following versions will now work without a hitch using Java SE on Windows and Linux: NetWeaver 2004 and NetWeaver 7.0. According to the company release, Java SE support is scheduled for early support for Windows 2008. This clears the way for an earlier certification of SAP’s NetWeaver versions on Windows 2008, too.

Read more about Sun’s commitment to SAP’s NetWeaver, here.

Reference Design Kit For SPARC-Based Systems Released

Santa Clara, California-based Sun Microsystems Inc has released a reference design kit that it hopes will prove useful to developers of embedded systems based on Sun’s UltraSPARC T2 processor.

The UltraSPARC is part of the SPARC series of processors offered by Sun Microsystems. The CPU functions at 1.17Ghz, has eight cores and 64 threads in one chip, and integrates dual 10Gb Ethernet network interface units (NIUs), eight stream processing units (SPUs) for line-rate cryptographic acceleration, and eight lines of PCI-Express expansion within its architecture. The CPU is tightly integrated to Sun’s Solaris 10 operating system and is also supported by Wind River Linux platform and Ubuntu Linux. The chip-multithreading technology (CMT) is constructed such that the processor consumes less than 2 watts per thread.

The Reference Design Kit (RDK) comprises the following material: ATX form factor hardware board, hardware user manual, board layout guidelines, signal integrity report, engineering specs, board schematics, gerber files, and board layout design. The kit also comes with software by way of user manual for software, OpenBoot Source with Porting document, Service Processor Document, and a CD that is loaded with RT, Boot Code, DD and application samples.

Read more about the RDK release here.

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