The Sybase announcement follows on the heels of a similar partnership that Sun and database rival Oracle Corp announced in May. Neither Sybase nor Oracle have committed to providing their databases for Solaris X86 by any specific date. Both vendors have long since supported all of the releases and versions of Solaris for the Sparc platform.
To date, some 600 independent software vendors have ported about 1,000 applications to Solaris X86, according to Sun. But that is a drop in the bucket compared to the 12,000 applications that are said to be available for the Sparc version of Solaris.
Nonetheless, the support of key players like Sybase and Oracle are vital in helping drive up support for Solaris X86. The growing popularity of 32-bit X86 platforms (based on processors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices, among a few other niche players like Transmeta and VIA Technologies) and the coming of age of 64-bit X86 platforms (from Intel and AMD) and the use of the Unix-alike Linux environment on these machines by companies who are trying to cut IT costs has forced Sun to try to move as much of the Solaris application portfolio to the X86 platform as it can, and as quickly as it can. Sun needs to keep customers who might otherwise move to Linux or Windows to stay on Solaris even if it is on an X86 platform.
While Sybase doesn’t get a lot of airplay these days in the three-way battle between IBM Corp, Oracle, and Microsoft Corp in the relational database market, Sybase has customers in key financial services, telecommunications, service provider, and government facilities who spend lots of bucks on IT. So the Sybase deal is very important to Sun, who wants to give those customers a less costly hardware option if they need one.
This article is based on material originally produced by ComputerWire.
