Contact N.Venkat Venkatraman, 617-353-7117, venkat@bu.edu

School of Management Professor N. “Venkat” Venkatraman, chairman of the Information Systems Department, says a would-be acquisition of Sun Microsystems by IBM could well serve IBM’s push to lead the effort to create for a “smarter” business infrastructure.

“IBM’s supposed move to acquire Sun Microsystems is seen in some quarters as a radical shift in IBM’s strategy away from its recent focus on software and services back to hardware.  I see it less about going back to hardware but more in tune with IBM’s recent push to be a force shaping the new ‘smarter’ business infrastructure in tune with the Obama administration’s vision.

“It is also very consistent with IBM’s vision of ‘cloud computing’ with more and more services delivered from the cloud.  Just as IBM’s acquisition of Lotus gave them a springboard into middleware in the 1990s, this acquisition will give them a dominant position in their fight against HP and Cisco in the short-term and Google, Salesforce.com and others in the longer-term as the IT architecture shifts to the cloud.”

Contact N. “Venkat” Venkatraman, 617-353-7117, venkat@bu.edu