Sun and Hewlett-Packard will detail a partnership agreement Wednesday morning. Could this be a step towards a merger? I've long said that there are strong synergies between the two companies but they are held apart by different cultures.

A merged HP and Sun would make a stronger competitor against IBM. It would create a West Coast versus East Coast rivalry that could unite the two cultures against a common enemy.

+HP would get Sun’s range of SPARC systems and an impressive future technology road map for SPARC microprocessors. This is a great challenger to IBM and its proprietary 64-bit Power microprocessor architecture. Margins on proprietary hardware are four to five times better than on industry-standard systems.

+HP would gain from Sun’s large accounts in financial services and telecoms. These sectors are huge IT spenders.

+Sun needs a much stronger services arm, and HP has a strong IT services group.

+HP would gain Sun’s middleware, v.important against IBM’s WebSphere middleware. Middleware software has a very high profit margin.

+Both companies could consolidate their computer labs.

+Sun’s Java technologies have consumer electronics and mobile phone applications and momentum.

+Both have strong datacenter technologies. They could dominate cloud computing.

There's more . . .