We think the p5 stuff is pretty interesting, Singer said. IBM has spent a lot of money on benchmarks, and as far as we can tell, it did not manipulate them. The truth is, they did a reasonably good job on the p5.
He went on to say that while IBM had spent probably several hundred million dollars developing the Squadron technology, he found it puzzling that IBM talks a lot about Linux and how it is the future, but it is making its money on AIX on Power.
He said further that there was a noticeable absence of HP-UX and related server announcements coming out of rival Hewlett-Packard Co and then picked up the old two-horse race analogy that all three Unix vendors have been using for years to try to exile at least one of their rivals from any conversation in the data center.
Singer said he was convinced that the Unix market had come down to Sun and IBM, both of whom had steeped into the breach made by HP’s beleaguered status in the Unix market.
That is, to put it mildly, putting it on a bit thick, which you expect from a feisty chief competitive officer. The Unix market is a solid three horse race, with several open source BSD ponies doing a lot of workhorse jobs even if they never get any glory. No matter how many times IBM and Sun protest otherwise, HP can and is competing in the Unix market, and it is doing it on Itanium systems.
