Hello Kirill,
thanks for your question and information. I am the Product Manager that manages LiveCycles platform support.
We have considered Solaris on x86 in the past and as Jayan says it was considered to be below the threshold of making business sense. I agree that Intel is a pretty good price point for many types of deployments, but it depends on the features a customer requires from their deployment.
The real cost in platform support is the certification and the length of time support needs to be maintained. Development costs are often not major assuming we get the thirdparty technology that we use to support the platform.
For Solaris support we only support Sparc hardware and in addition to that we recommend *against* using T series (CMT) architectures. LiveCycle usage patterns are not normally massively multi threaded enough to benefit from that architecture and the relative slowness of individual threads on CMT processors typically does not meet our customers' expectations for a LiveCycle deployment. We have customers that are looking to migrate LiveCycle deployments from V440 type systems and the T Series was the only option at the same price point for many years, but there are now M3000 systems at a similar price point to the v440s that are designed for software like LiveCycle. Adobe does recommend the use of Ultra Sparc64 VII based systems which are in the various M series classes.
If customers do need to use Sun x86 hardware they can use Windows or Linux. So it is really the Solaris OS that is the obstacle and we will not support that for the foreseeable future.
I do apologize for this decision, we do understand that it is not ideal for some customers, but after evaluation of the option we cannot support it as part of our LiveCycle business.
Kind Regards Chris de Groot.
