Local Authorities and SUN hardware/software & Solaris

Question

It has come to my attention that nearly every local authority in Kent is ditching or has ditch SUN Solaris in favour of MS Windows, sighting the following reasons:
Sun Sparc kit is very expensive.
Unix system administrators demand high wages.
All applications used within a local authority now run under Windows.
On the same subject free ware solutions such as OpenOffice fail to integrate into any of the councils systems, making them of no interest.
As a Unix system admin guy in a local authority, I find this trend rather alarming.
With the advent of cheap SAN's and VMware this trend can only accelerate.
Do SUN have any plans to counter this trend?

Answer 1

I doubt that our MS Windows team will consider the AMD x86 route, now that all our Windows servers have been consolidated onto a SAN under VMWare.
With the ability to carry out system snapshots in seconds and reducing our Windows server count down from over twenty to one, the Sun hardware is looking very expensive, to both purchase and maintain.
As for an answer I was looking more along the lines of what can we do to improve things, however I believe it may be a little too late, for us at least!.