IBM and HP take shots at Sun

Who is the Wall Street king?

By Ashlee Vance, 21st September 2004

Cloud storage: Lower cost and increase uptime

Never shy about disrupting a rival's product launch, IBM and HP took their swipes at Sun Microsystems just as the vendor kicked off an event on Wall Street.

IBM has sealed a deal that will bring Random Walk Computing's WOLF (Web Order Logic Framework) product over to its Power-based Unix and Linux servers. Random Walk has also signed up to partner with IBM in moving financial services companies off of their existing Unix boxes and onto IBM gear. This partnership was announced minutes before Sun Microsystems President Jonathan Schwartz began addressing Wall Street, as part of one of Sun's major quarterly product launch events.

Random Walk's WOLF product is used to get electronic brokerage and trading systems up and running.

While IBM's announcement is a bit thin, it is a nasty jab at Sun. Over the past couple of years, IBM's Power-based servers have gained steadily on Sun's UltraSPARC-based systems. IBM, no doubt, wanted to remind the financial services companies of its strong presence.

For its part, HP announced that has pulled 200 customers in the last 18 months away from Sun servers and onto its own kit. HP too pointed to financial services wins, saying 40 of the 200 customers came from this market.

Sun decided to hold this particular product launch on Wall Street in an effort to woo back the very customers that made it a smashing success and then later a struggling server maker. Sun is announcing a series of customer wins with financial services companies and trying to tempt the firms with both UltraSPARC and Opteron-based systems running Solaris. ®