Sun deal could make IBM unbeatable in Unix server market
An acquisition of Sun would give IBM nearly two-thirds of the worldwide Unix server market, which could attract the attention of regulators
Follow @infoworldIf IBM actually were to buy Sun Microsystems, the world's largest maker of Unix servers would take over the second largest vendor. Unix servers may not be getting as much attention as Sun's Java and MySQL technologies are in merger speculation land, but it is the Unix market that could put the prospective deal on the radar of regulators.
An acquisition of Sun would give IBM nearly two-thirds of the worldwide Unix server market, according to research firm IDC. IBM sold $6.4 billion worth of Unix servers last year, for a 37.2 percent market share, while Sun's sales amounted to $4.8 billion, for a 28.1 percent share, IDC said. Trailing behind in third place was Hewlett-Packard Co., with $4.6 billion in sales and a 26.5 percent market share; after HP, the rest of the vendors counted by IDC had single-digit shares at best.
[ Special report: IBM in talks to buy Sun. ]
Unix systems, which IDC said accounted for 36 percent of overall server market revenue in last year's fourth quarter, continue to see their share of datacenter processing be eroded by Windows and Linux servers. But many businesses and government agencies still rely on Unix machines to run some of their most critical applications and databases.
IBM owns the mainframe market, and the prospect of it gaining a substantial piece of the Unix business -- and in particular, the high end of that market -- via an acquisition of Sun is worrisome to Ed Black, president and CEO of the Computer & Communications Industry Association in Washington.
High-end Unix servers, such as HP's Itanium-based systems running HP-UX and Sun's top-of-the-line UltraSparc-based hardware with Solaris, are the machines most often cited as mainframe alternatives.
"There is no doubt they've got a monopoly in the mainframe market," Black said of IBM. User choice requires having access to substitute products, he added -- but if IBM acquires Sun, it "takes a huge competitor away," said Black, whose trade group represents such companies as Google, Oracle, Red Hat, Advanced Micro Devices and Microsoft.
IBM has faced periodic legal challenges over its mainframe dominance, most recently in January, when a Tampa, Fla.-based mainframe maker named T3 Technologies Inc. filed an antitrust complaint with the European Commission accusing IBM of refusing to sell its z/OS operating system to T3 customers. IBM rejected the claims and accused T3 of trying to violate its intellectual property rights.
