Summary
The impact will not be significant since a transition to IBM AIX (as an example) for Solaris trained administrators is straight forward and not prohibitively costly. The future savings of using AIX versus SPARC/Solaris will far outweigh the conversion/implementation non-recurring cost. Utilizing a gradual conversion approach will enhance the IBM Brand and service offerring since it is done as cost effective and logically as possible in an unobtrusive manner. This is a tremendous win for IBM's customers as well as IBM.
Analysis
I cannot emphasize enough as a former Sun employee with some access to executive management at SUN (including Scott McNealy) that this is the best outcome for SUN and its customers, since Solaris is a high quality secure operating system and its employee's have always been customer first centric, that there efforts and support in the future will be phenomenal coming from the IBM worldwide team as they migrate in a thoughful and appropriate manner the systems and services SUN currently offers. Wall Street, the telecom industry and the Department of Defense as well will have improved functionality accompanied by significant cost savings.
