Sun, Dell Announce Solaris 10 Distribution Agreement

During the opening keynote of Oracle OpenWorld today in San Francisco, Dell and Sun Microsystems announced a multi-year distribution agreement in which Dell will provide OEM support for Sun's Solaris 10 operating system.

Once considered an arch competitor in the hardware field, Dell will now be working more closely with Sun to provide Solaris support, as well as to give new Dell customers an intriguing alternative.

"Look, we're at a different phase in our history, and I think the industry is [as well]," Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz told attendees this morning. "We're not going to be an industry that's drawing boundary lines between one product and the next, and saying we're only this or only that. It's a marketplace that's filled with 'coop-etition' - I think Dell would agree with that. We want to collectively go after the biggest market we can build together, rather than in isolation."

Dell customers will now be able to order rack or blade server products with either the Solaris or OpenSolaris OS. If a Solaris-based Dell product has technical issues, customers will now be able to call Dell to receive support - something that was rarely productive before the deal. Furthermore, interested customers will be able to download OpenSolaris from Dell's web site, starting immediately.

"Part of our focus to 'simplify IT'," remarked Dell CEO Michael Dell, referring to his company's new mantra going forward, "means delivering customers choice; and by adding Solaris to our solutions set we are able to do that."

"Collectively, our customers have actually crossed paths quite a bit historically," Mr. Dell remarked at another point, "and this is just a case where it made sense for us to go work together to deliver the software on the Dell boxes moving forward in a more formal fashion than what we have in the past. I think our customers will benefit, it's going to simplify both our customers' efforts in terms of deploying, and it's all about choice and trying to provide choice to our end customers."

For over a decade, Dell and Sun have been rivals in the server market. But today's announcement shows a continuing trend of companies forging retail partnerships to ensure customer satisfaction, at a time when consumers have more of a say over the products those companies offer. This is the first time Solaris will be approved for use by Dell.

"The stupidest thing in the world we could have done would be to go to those customers and say, 'You blew it. You made a mistake,'" Schwartz said. "Because in all likelihood, they'd look at us and say, 'Well, you obviously don't understand me.' And that's not what either of us want to do. We want to go after the marketplace both as we can drive it as well as that we can see it."

Even though Solaris operates on a wide variety of x64 and x86 products from Dell, IBM and Hewlett-Packard, partnerships such as this allow manufacturers to alongside Sun to make sure the hardware and OS work flawlessly. Earlier in the year, IBM announced a multi-year agreement to sell Solaris on its products, and Hewlett-Packard also offers a limited amount of products powered by Solaris.

Solaris typically runs on computers equipped with Sun's SPARC processors, though in recent months, AMD and Intel processors have taken more of Solaris' share, especially since the agreement reached between Intel and Sun last January.