Lately, there's been no shortage of speculation about IBM possibly acquiring Sun Microsystems. If such an acquisition were to come to pass, expect to see greater support for Sun's OpenSolaris operating system on the IBM System z mainframe- especially as part of a data center and enterprise IT consolidation strategy. Already, Sine Nomine Associates, which presented at SHARE's recent conference in Austin, has ported OpenSolaris to System z running on top of z/VM in an Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL) processor. Also, expect to see greater IBM activity around the Java language and Java Enterprise Edition framework, currently within Sun's orbit.

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