Dell may cash in on IBM's Sun purchase

The chief executive of Dell Inc said yesterday that talk of IBM possibly buying Sun Microsystems was providing an "enormous opportunity" to the world's No 2 PC maker in the corporate server market.

Michael Dell said such talk created uncertainty over the future of Sun's Solaris-based servers and accelerated a customer migration to the servers based on standard industry components, known as x86 servers, which are Dell's mainstay product.

Apart from the potential IBM-Sun union, Dell is also facing an uphill battle with network equipment maker Cisco Systems with and Hewlett-Packard. Cisco has announced a foray into the server market and HP has started to offer a more complete package of technology services to its corporate clients after its purchase of EDS.