IBM deal with Sun could leave Fujitsu servers up in the air

With the industry at large collectively having verified that IBM and Sun Microsystems are in talks toward a possible merger deal, the question of the fate of Sun's long-standing SPARC system architecture becomes a topic of intense conversation. Today, a Fujitsu America executive probably did the opposite of what he'd intended, first by telling Reuters he wouldn't comment, and then commenting in a way he might not have planned on.

"We continue to sell server-based products, we want to assure all our customers ... that product we sell in the SPARC line of products we will continue selling and maintaining them," Farhat Ali told Reuters, effectively saying that anyone who's already purchased SPARC-architecture servers from Fujitsu need not worry about long-term customer support. That isn't exactly saying the company will go forth with plans that seemed very ambitious just months ago, including beefing up its midrange SPARC server line.

Just last October, Fujitsu announced the availability of its new mid-range T5440 Enterprise server, intended to bring SPARC architecture closer to the "M" part of the "SMB" customer base. It's a surprisingly high-performance server priced at around $45,000, designed at the time to take IBM head-on in that space. But it's a Solaris-based server; and analysts and industry insiders have openly voiced their opinions in recent days that IBM probably has a bigger interest in a lack of Solaris than in Solaris itself, being a principal provider of Linux.