IBM in Rumored $6.5 billion bid for Sun Microsystems

by Jordan Yerman | March 18, 2009 at 07:16 am

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Computing megalith IBM is supposedly in talks to buy Sun Microsystems for $6.5 billion in cash.

Apparently, an IBM/Sun deal could happen as soon as April 3.

Sun is a data-center and software company, whose best-know products include Java and Open Office. Java (not to be cunfused with javascript, which helps make web pages pretty) runs on over a billion PCs, as well as an equal number of mobile phones (that little coffee cup that appears when you fire up Tetris on your mobile? Java!), and also drives Blu-Ray players.

The software is free, but the service and support are not. Also, Sun is a huge contributor to Linux.

Sun's value peaked with the dotcom boom in 2001, but has been sliding since and fell sharply with the rest of the Nasdaq technology-oriented stocks last autumn. IBM's has remained steady as the company has in the past few years focussed increasingly on selling services rather than hardware; it sold off its PC-making division to the Chinese company Lenovo in December 2004, perceiving that the loss-making division was unlikely to move back into profit in the long term.

Last year, Sun had purchased MySQL ("My Ess Queue Ell"), an open source database system which, if you're on shared hosting, you probably use.

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