It must be tempting for IBM to think about acquiring Sun, a direct competitor. Big Blue would essentially be buying a whole new set of customers, although it would then have to go through the painful and distracting job of rationalizing the two companies with cuts coming mainly from the Sun side.

But such a move would strike a blow in yesterday's war between consolidating computer companies. The new war started two days ago when Cisco Systems announced its plans to jump into the server market with an architectural play that unites networking and computer systems in a larger offering tailored for today's growing data centers.

Cisco's plan is integrate servers and networking into a larger product with new efficiencies. It has the ability to deliver on that vision with its clout in ASICs and merged networks such as Fibre Channel over Ethernet.

This will play well with massive and highly integrated data centers from Internet giants such as Amazon.com, Google and Microsoft. These Internet data centers will host a growing share of the world's applications in the emerging cloud computing era, and they want fewer vendors with broader and deeper offerings.

In this new scenario, IBM does not need to buy more computer customers as much as it needs to attract interest in bigger, broader offerings that unite server blades with networking switches and storage into bigger more streamlined offerings.

Today, archrival Hewlett-Packard arguably has a bigger presence in the networking world than IBM with HP's ProCurve networking division. If it wasn't on the case already, Cisco's announcement this week surely has HP scrambling to find new ways to unit its ProCurve and server products now.

If IBM spends the next year rationalizing the IBM and Sun server businesses, it will lose valuable time getting to the new computer/communications nirvana. IBM could also consider beefing up its storage offerings, a slice of the future unified portfolio where Cisco is still relatively weak.

Rather than buy Sun, IBM should let it twist in the wind. Sun still has plenty of smart people and resources, but it is not nearly as well equipped to fight at the level Cisco's move suggests is necessary.

If IBM does buy Sun, I'd recommend Brocade and Juniper start a bidding war for Fujitsu-Siemens, perhaps the world's third or fourth largest server maker. Such a combination could help those companies leapfrog the legendary IBM because they would at least be fighting the right war.