"Enterprise computing is fairly complex, and we try to make things less complex," said Timmerman, who is also president of the IBM user group Share. "If you are Solaris shop, you already have Solaris on Sparc. Why would you want to introduce another complication to that?"

One reason for such a move might be a price advantage, said Timmerman. But even with a cost advantage, the per-server cost savings may not be worth it for most corporations. Moreover, the two vendors, IBM and Sun, leapfrog each other in price and performance, he said. And as far as open-source software goes, the university has been moving more toward Linux.

"Someone might want it [Solaris on Power] if they have a large Sun infrastructure and want to take advantage of the Power architecture," said Robert Rosen, a CIO at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. "However, if someone is a Power user, I don't see any advantage to go from AIX to Solaris. More likely, one would go from AIX to Linux."

IBM officials were unavailable for comment. Sun chairman Scott McNealy said this week that love to work with IBM and develop an agreement regarding the Power chip similar to what it has announced with Intel for optimizing the x86 chips for the Solaris operating system.