HP execs laugh off Solaris merger offer

During Hewlett-Packard's Business Critical Systems conference in Macau this week, executives described a recent offer by Sun Microsystems' boss Scott McNealy to merge Solaris with HP-UX as "almost laughable."

On March 1, McNealy published an open letter offering to work with HP to converge its HP-UX version of Unix with Sun's Solaris 10 OS. McNealy argued that the move would be beneficial, because Sun's support for Unix on x86/x64 servers would enable HP-UX customers to continue running Unix on HP's x86/x64 ProLiant servers, rather than migrate to HP's Itanium-based Integrity servers.

But the offer was written off as a publicity stunt, HP executives said. It coincided with a joint HP, Oracle and Intel deal that would lead to Oracle software being optimized for HP Integrity servers, they noted.

"We have no intention of doing that," said Richard Marcello, HP's senior vice president and general manager of business critical servers. "I think we're really clear that that's almost a laughable offer, especially in light of what Sun has been doing market share-wise and where they're at in the marketplace now."

Read more at ZDNet Australia.