'Slammin' Sammy' Palmisano: IBM CEO-to-Be Comes Out Swinging at the Competition

On the Compaq/HP Merger:

"They want to be a services-based solution company combined with infrastructure. They will divest in Unix and make a big play in Intel, but don't be too concerned about that because it will protect the printer business. The intent is clear, it's much more about a solution play."

On Sun:

"Scott McNealy came out in a Penguin suit [at LinuxWorld. That is a real shift. The fact is that Sun sees the need to adopt Linux. Sun is down, what, 25, 30 or 50 percent? We were down slightly."

On BEA:

"WebSphere was up 44 percent. BEA, up 18 [percent had a good year in a tough environment, but fundamentally we outperformed them. "

On Microsoft:

"Fundamentally with .Net ... they see the need for a different play within the infrastructure. They see that with .Net. Now what .Net becomes, we are all going to have to observe and learn. We only know what the vision is of it today."

On EMC:

"EMC--a company you can love to hate. They had a model that was phenomenal--just like IBM, big branch infrastructure and high gross margins. Except an alternative arrived called Shark that was half the price, with a new architecture and with gross margins that were better. The rest is history, we gained four and a half points of share in the storage space."

On Oracle:

"IBM's database business grew [market share in the high 20s. Oracle unfortunately was flat or up 2 percent. I know you feel badly for Oracle, so do we ... so do we.

"Oracle wants to be an application services company."

On Dell:

"The business model, whether we like it or not, has a lot of customer appeal. The model has a lot of economic features, and we will see if it can be adopted elsewhere."