Itanium: Sun Microsystems’ worst nightmare?

Ashok Kumar, an executive and senior research analyst with U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray, posted an opinion piece on CNET.com explaining why the first generation 64 bit chips from Intel won’t do much harm but the second and third gens, coming by 2003, will cause Sun serious difficulties if Sun persists in only offering the proprietary SPARC line.

Not so sure Kumar is right though. Improvements in Solaris and newer versions of the chip will improve performance and while, as stated, other *NIX vendors will offer their systems on Itanium I expect these vendors will also attempt to maintain the price points of the systems at current levels so that Sun will still be able to compete on price/performance. Perhaps more significantly, Kumar is overlooking two things Sun has kept in the backpocket: Solaris on Intel, which is not actively being ported to Itanium but a good amount of the work was done before that project was put on hold, and the Cobalt Server Appliances, which run Linux on Intel-compatible chips. If necessary, management could seriously rev up either or both of these quickly.