By Jeremy C. Wright, Staff Writer
Wednesday, 1 December 2004 23:17 EST

IBM has decided to extend its support for Sybase, a competing database product to its DB2 database package, to present a Linux server-software package.

Sybase’s Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) database competes directly with IBM’s DB2 package – neither of which hold significant market share against database powerhouses Oracle and Microsoft, as well as Open Source database MySQL.

The new product will be jointly marketed with IBM’s eServer OpenPower Linux Servers. The move is simply an extension of IBM’s existing support of Sybase ASE which IBM supports on its AIX platform – though this move is a first for IBM’s Linux-based servers.

The move allows IBM to pitch to healthcare and financial services companies who have a strong Sybase presence but are also contemplating various moves to Linux OSs – in effect providing a bridge for companies to walk in order to make Linux adoption more seamless and palatable.

The timing of the deal is good for both companies as sales of servers running Linux jumped more than 40% over last year. The increasingly popular OS is benefiting from companies switching off of UNIX as well as the popular perception that Linux is an ideal solution for database and network services infrastructure.

Sybase began licensing Sun's Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) in 2000. The two later put together a 25-terabyte data warehousing architecture.

This past summer, Sun and Sybase staked their claim in the burgeoning RFID (define) market together, agreeing to make middleware that will move data from an RFID tag reader into an enterprise resource planning system.

Research firm IDC estimates that the database software license market on Linux grew nearly 150% to $522M as customers moved off of older UNIX environments to newer hardware and the Linux platform.