Date: 3/1/2006 HP and Sun share a common history of innovation. We've both delivered terrific products over the years. But HP has also made strategic decisions that compel its customers, developers and partners to change: ending development of your enterprise servers based on PA-RISC, and relegating your operating system, HP-UX, to Itanium. We propose an alternative - that Sun and HP commit to converge HP-UX with Sun's flagship volume UNIX, Solaris 10. As Unix operating systems, HP-UX and Solaris 10 share a common heritage. By combining our resources and investments, HP's customer and developer communities would gain the benefit of the fastest growing operating system in the marketplace: improved economics, rapid innovation, and a rich future roadmap otherwise unavailable to your Proliant user base (given that HP-UX doesn't run on Proliant). Solaris is a vendor-neutral OS supported on over 550 non-Sun platforms; we're delighted that HP has enabled 64-bit Solaris 10 on its ProLiant servers. Solaris 10 on HP XEON and Opteron delivers the mission-critical 64-bit environment customers require today, versus an expensive and risky transition with an uncertain future. Solaris 10 has momentum: over four million licenses in just the past year, more licenses than HP has shipped with HP-UX in the history of the company. Solaris 10 is open source, delivers world-record performance, provides logical partitioning (just like a mainframe), and supports Linux applications -- all at no charge. With the end of PA-RISC systems, and HP-UX now only available on Itanium, we're convinced a converged HP-UX/Solaris 10 platform could play a far stronger role in HP's product portfolio. We believe there's benefit to HP, our mutual customers, developers and partners. We're hopeful that HP will work with us and further embrace Solaris 10. I would welcome the opportunity to meet and discuss how we can work together to satisfy customer demand. We stand ready to help. Regards, |