Sun’s Deal With HP Unlikely To Make A Difference

Sun Micrososystems (JAVA) and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) this morning held a joint press conference to announce a multi-year agreement to allow HP to distribute and provide support for Sun’s Solaris 10 operating system on HP ProLiant servers. Whew, just thinking about that sentence makes me drowsy. But you don’t need to know much more than that, thankfully. Goldman Sachs analyst David Baile y wrote in a research note today that the deal is unlikely to result in any additional meaningful revenue for Sun, which he continues to rate a Sell. He notes that similar arrangements with IBM (IBM) and Dell (DELL) have not been significant revenue drivers, and he sees no reason to think things will be any different with HP. Indeed, Bailey notes that the operating systems of choice for PC servers are Microsoft (MSFT) Windows and Linux, and not proprietary versions of Unix like Solaris. And he points out that Solaris has been certified to run on ProLiant servers since 1996.  ... (link)