StorageTek Products Still Have Solid Future

Of course, some of Sun's acquisitions have suffered from "disappear and come back two years later, out of date" syndrome. But as Canepa keenly observes, there's a big difference between buying a start-up with a nearly complete product and acquiring an established vendor like StorageTek.

Sun likes to talk about the StorageTek acquisition in terms of the "IT ecosystem," and that's a good analogy. If you want to thrive, you don't dismantle a working part of the ecosystem. StorageTek is profitable, and the merger will give Sun and StorageTek salespeople a large laundry list of products to cross-sell.

In fact, StorageTek customers have much less to fear than they think. They'll benefit if the merger results in more product options. And Sun has assured continuing interoperability between StorageTek and other server vendors.

The StorageTek acquisition isn't about increasing Sun server sales, as some have postulated. An educated look at Sun's offerings demonstrates that it's serious about delivering solutions in the storage space, and this deal enhances the Sun storage product line. True, Sun has made much of its business as a server vendor, but it also has a history of growing its business by branching out.

Tape storage isn't going away anytime soon, and neither is Sun if it keeps its StorageTek customers happy. If the only thing that changes is the name on the case, those customers won't have any reason to switch vendors.