IBM to buy Sun

IBM's potential purchase of Sun has been speculated recently, however it also seems various large company's procurement departments have been told to hold of making any Sun purchases and speak to IBM.

If the purchase does go ahead what will remain of Sun? Sparc will likely die (or just go over to Fujitsu completely), MySQL will drop to the wayside (or at least dropped off IBM's portfolio - they have enough of their own databases), Solaris will just go Open with little involvement from IBM if any at all.

The only thing that IBM definitely want is Java.

$6.5bn is cheap considering the prices paid for Compaq and others in recent times, but manufacturing chips - however good they are is expensive. This could be the end of an era and Sun may be disappearing over the IBM horizon.