As I sit in more and more meetings with companies in the IP communications hardware space I keep hearing that these companies are moving from hardware to software because that’s where the money is. In fact, at a recent conference I spoke at, dealers of Avaya were very concerned about this move as software and hardware are treated differently from an accounting perspective.<\/p>\n
In addition, it seemed as if the dealers at the conference were not ready to make the switch as they are comfortable selling and maintaining hardware and software is somehow foreign.<\/p>\n
It seems however that these resellers and others will have to get used to this shift as even Sun is slowly moving to become a a major software vendor. Recently in fact Sun CEO Jonathon Schwartz mentioned that the MySQL acquisition is the most important acquisition in Sun’s history.<\/p>\n
For years, Linux was the competition to Sun’s Solaris and Sun downplayed the open source threat. Now it seems the company has done a major about face and soon, the Sun brand will be synonymous with various open source solutions.<\/p>\n