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Sun is mad at IBM. Sun’s President and COO Jonathan Schwartz even wrote an angry letter to our CEO Sam Palmisano last Friday. Understandably. This eWeek report from the 17th of January states that IBM’s refused to “test, certify and support its enterprise software applications on Solaris 10 for x86 platforms”. Which is strange, considering that IBM’s fully agreed to do the exact same thing for Solaris 10 on SPARC.

The ostensible reason from IBM is that they don’t anticipate customer demand for Solaris 10 on x86. An IBM spokesperson said that if and when Solaris 10 on x86 reaches “the required level of customer interest”, they’ll “review the matter”.

The argument does sound a little specious. If IBM begins this process of testing and certification only when customer demand does hot up, it might be a case of too late. Especially if other vendors can competing products, all certified. And IBM has time on its hands: Solaris 10 for both platforms will be available only in March, so there’s time for the certification process.

So, being the conspiracy theorists we are, let’s try to analyse the real reason behind IBM’s stubborn refusal. According to most analysts, IBM wants to thwart Solaris on x86 entirely. Solaris is an OS that directly competes with IBM’s AIX and Linux OSes. AIX currently runs only on the POWER platform, but IBM offers Linux on its entire range of Intel-based xSeries servers. With Solaris on x86, IBM loses an opportunity to offer a Linux-and-xSeries bundle, especially with the hype that Sun’s successfully built around Solaris 10. Novell might also figure in the calculations, now that IBM’s pumped in USD 50 million into the company to enable it to buy SUSE. IBM provides Enterprise Linux flavours from Novell and RedHat on its servers.

Also, IBM’d like nothing better than to replace a Solaris-on-x86 configuration with an AIX-on-POWER 5 one, for high-end systems. One pitch it could make to customers is that a complete IBM solution might be cheaper and easier to support than a bits-and-pieces Sun-and-IBM one. Indeed, according to the article, Scott McNealy was told by IBM’s CEO Sam Palmisano that “IBM no longer has to support an environment that includes Sun, even if it is one that is best for the customer.”

IBM has the advantage of being able to offer a wide product range, whereas Sun still remains very much a platform provider. IBM can use its middleware applications muscle to promote its platform further, and vice versa.