Applications: Solaris/SPARC vs AIX/Power

Paul Murphy has been looking at how customers might choose between Solaris/SPARC and AIX/Power. An important differentiator could be application availability. He concludes

So what’s the bottom line? Well, we’re not going to get definitive numbers on the ISV universe without spending a lot more time on this, but it’s probaby fair to suggest that the Solaris application base is counted in the thousands and growing where the AIX base is counted in the hundreds.

Sun does not make it easy to find their catalog of partner solutions. For an ISV (independent Software Vendor) or IHV (independent Hardware Vendor), a catalog listing is a benefit of the "Sun Partner Advantage Program". The directories with those listings can be found under

http://www.sun.com/partners

You will find entries for 3,394 Partners and 11,261 Products in the database.

In addition to those commercial applications, a growing body of free and open source solutions can be found on blastwave.org. Most of the 1,500-2,000 compiled binary packages on blastwave.org would not be consider applications in the way that Paul Murphy was writing. Many of the blastwave applications are infrastructure components and utilities such as Apache, PostgeSQL, OpenSSL, Gnome, VNC, vim. Having such a comprehensive toolbox does allow Solaris customers a lot of flexibility in getting Free and Open Source (FOSS) solutions up and running.

This is a small but growing body of FOSS enterprise applications with optional commercial support, such as SugarCRM. I am not aware of a site that has a comprehensive listing of applications like that.