Here's an opinion piece in the Silicon Valley Watcher about why a Hewlett-Packard/Sun Microsystems combination makes sense. By themselves, those two companies don't have enough to compete against IBM. Together, they have <A HREF="http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2005/07/a_hpsun_combina_1">plenty of synergies</A>, including the fact that HP would gain Sun's middleware, which is very important against IBM's WebSphere middleware.