| | By John Daly in Germany @ Wednesday, March 18, 2009 10:56 AM
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| | IBM is currently in negotiations with Sun Microsystems, reports the Wall Street Journal.
Sources familiar with the deal told the Journal IBM would pay a minimum sum of $6.5 billion in cash for Sun, a premium of 100% over Sun's share price last Tuesday. Sun shares peaked at over $240 back during the dotcom bubble, but are now merely worth $4.97. IBM is apparently interested in buying Sun to strengthen its position against Hewlett-Packard and to improve its reach on the internet, in data storage and government and telecommunications.
 The main reason seems to be that a takeover would add clout against Microsoft and Intel. Sun has apparently asked to be taken over, says the article citing sources. Rival server-maker Hewlett-Packard declined.
IBM came second in the server market in last year's third quarter, claiming a market share of 30.2%. HP came out first back then and held 30.7% of the market, merely 0.5% more than IBM. Dell ranked third (12%), whereas Sun only came out fourth. Sun had a slice of 9.5%.
End of February, Sun bragged its newest chip multi-threaded (CMT) SPARC Enterprise server would outperform IBM's power systems. The company stated the UltraSPARC T2 Plus could handle 256 threads, allowing 14,000 users to use enterprise software such as Siebel CRM on one single server. CMT servers accounted for $1.4 billion of Sun's business, a California raisin said. X
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