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Q & A
Jonathan Schwartz Comments on the Symantec-Veritas Deal
Friday, December 17, 12:00 PM PT
Q: Is the Symantec-Veritas merger good or bad for Sun?
A: It's great news for Sun. It validates what we have been saying for
years: that the world is moving to a utility compute world with greater
simplicity, fewer vendors, and a more reliable infrastructure.
Q: Does Sun have a good relationship with these two companies?
A: Sun has a strong partnership with both companies. More than half of the
Veritas installed base runs on Sun and Veritas announced its support for
Solaris 10 on both the x86 and SPARC platform at the time of our Solaris
10 launch in November. Symantec is expanding its enterprise-level IT
management portfolio to ensure both the availability and security of
information assets and Sun has been a strong partner with Symantec
there. We have also partnered closely with our mutual channel partners.
A stronger vendor in security and storage software is good news for us
as a partner and good news for customers.
Q: Is the growing trend towards industry consolidation good for Sun?
A: Absolutely. We are one of the best-capitalized companies in the
industry, with $7.4 billion in cash. We will be one of the consolidators.
Q: What about these rumors that Sun is going to buy Red Hat or Novell?
A: We never comment on rumor and speculation. We understand customers are
increasingly concerned about the lock-in of Red Hat's proprietary Linux,
but rather than acquire the company, we plan on acquiring their
customers one by one with native Linux execution in Solaris 10.
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