By buying Sun MicroSystems, IBM will become the biggest vendor of high end Unix systems. In this economy consolidation in the industry is expected, but this merger could raise some real competition issues. Especially considering that IBM has a near monopoly in the mainframe market.
Sun MicroSystems is the owner of Java, arguably, the most popular programming cross-platform language, especially on the Internet. It is unclear what IBM’s plans could be for that market.
One of the things that has helped Oracle become as big as they are is the fact that they sell systems that run on Sun’s Solaris. IBM, which has it’s own SQL server, is going to quickly end that partnership or at least make it less collaborative. This might complicate Oracle’s life a little bit.
