By William Fellows
Siemens Computer Systems’ decision not to proceed with its investment in the 32-bit version of Sun Microsystems Inc’s Solaris x86 Unix provoked a flurry of responses from the Unix-on- Intel crowd hell bent on lending the impression that Sun’s own Unix-on-Intel aspirations are pipe dreams.
Following its joint venture and global marketing alliance with Fujitsu Ltd, Siemens told us it is to transfer all the resources going into its Solaris x86 development over to Solaris Sparc until Sun gets Solaris up on IA-64; if it ever does, as the Monterey Unix people are prone to remarking. In the meantime Siemens will begin reselling Fujitsu’s Sparc servers from October.
Predictably, the Monterey folk supporting IBM’s AIX and SCO UnixWare fused on IA-64 believe that Siemens’ decision is another nail in the coffin of Sun’s Solaris x86 campaign. They reason that if it can’t build an OEM business on 32-bit Intel boxes, it has no chance on IA-64. It will be a boutique or proprietary item at best, like Hewlett-Packard Co’s big-endian HP-UX on IA-64, they suggest. SCO says that Siemens’ decision is great news for it as Siemens will be offering UnixWare or Windows NT on its Primergy Intel servers.
Moreover, Fujitsu is now is number three revenue earner behind Compaq and Dell, albeit mostly through the channel which fits UnixWare to Fujitsu boxes. HP and IBM are its fourth and fifth largest OEM revenue earners. Meantime as much as the Monterey crowd love a Solaris x86 defection, they have neither Siemens nor Fujitsu in their camp yet.
