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Workstation vendor Sun Microsystems Inc. will acquire Integrated Micro Products (IMP), which is best known for the ft-SPARC, a fault- tolerant version of Sun's SPARC Unix platform for the telecom market (see AIN NEWS, Dec. 14, 1994). Sun will acquire the U.K.-based company with additional U.S. operations for $96.1 million, and will operate it as a new business unit within Sun's systems company, Sun Microsystems Computer Co. IMP CEO Mark I'Anson will remain in charge of the ft-SPARC line as vice president and general manager of the business unit.
The acquisition made a significant splash in some quarters, signaling Sun's entry into the high-end, fault-tolerant market of vendors like Tandem Computers Inc. and Stratus Computer Inc.. It also has implications for a war between fault-tolerant and high- availability solutions that has taken on almost religious overtones. Sun intends to use the acquisition to bring open systems economies of scale and the applications library of its Solaris operating system to bear on the fault-tolerant server market. Sun's strategy, however, goes beyond these issues to include a longer term "convergence play" that could help bring together wireless and wireline voice networks, as well as the Internet, into a fully interoperable intelligent network matrix....Wireless, Wireline, Web According to Doug Ehrenreich, Sun's director of market development for the telco and cable business, the natural evolution of network computing is toward a standard set of protocols capable of tying together all the different networks that exist today and leveraging the capabilities that come from that interoperability. "My definition of WWW isn't World Wide Web," said...