Sun Microsystems Inc., looking to poach customers from a rival in a weak market for server computers, said on Thursday it had begun contacting companies that may be worried about a legal challenge to IBM's rights to the Unix operating system.
Sun, which has been hit hard along with rivals IBM and Hewlett-Packard Co. during the high-tech recession, said the effort to contact customers began this week was backed by a campaign also aimed at exploiting the legal dispute between International Business Machines Corp. and SCO Group Inc.
"Call me opportunistic, but this is a huge opening for Sun, so we are moving quickly and aggressively to capitalize on it," Scott McNealy, Sun's chairman and chief executive said in an e-mail to Reuters.
Sun's servers use its own proprietary microprocessors or Intel Corp. chips and its Solaris version of Unix as well as Linux. That puts Sun in competition with servers running the freely available Linux operating system as well as IBM servers that use its AIX version of Linux.
News source: Yahoo! News
