Convincing the world that it is serious about Solaris on X86 was the easy part. Getting the world to use Solaris on X86 is another matter entirely. As is always the case with any new hardware or operating system platform, the support of independent software vendors will largely determine if Solaris 10 and its follow-ons live in a market where Linux and Windows are rapidly growing as server platforms.
Solaris on Sparc may have 12,000 applications and thousands of ISVs, but the X86 version is basically starting from zero and has a much smaller base of applications than even the Itanium chip from Intel. But Sun is off to a good start with Solaris 10, with 140 ISVs having agreed to port some 325 applications to it.
Sun has not said how many of these ISVs are porting to both the Sparc and the X86 implementations of Solaris 10, but they would be foolish not to, since this will be where Sun sells the bulk of its Solaris 10 licenses in the coming years. Sun has 270 X86 systems certified for Solaris 9, and has 80 certified for Solaris 10, which doesn’t even ship until late January or early February.
Notable on the list of supporters for Solaris is Oracle, which just finished the port of its Oracle 10g database for Solaris 9 and has committed to supporting its database on Xeon and Opteron servers and Sparc servers running Solaris 10. Sun and Oracle, the two original Silicon Valley dot-coms, have over 70,000 joint customers worldwide.
Presumably, Sun and Oracle will support the Oracle Financials ERP suite on Solaris 10 on those three platforms as well. (PeopleSoft and SAP have agreed to do this, so it seems likely Oracle will, too.) With other key software vendors in the Solaris base on board, such as VERITAS, SAS Institute, and BEA Systems, Sun can cover a big portion of its installed base and hopefully prevent more defections to Linux and Windows.
