IBM and Sequent officially announced a merger today, July 12th, although it is easier to think of it as a takeover. IBM will pay 8 a share for Sequent putting a total value of 10 million on the company. Sequent was founded in 1983 and pioneered Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) and Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) systems for commercial environments. In 1997, it was the world's fastest growing vendor of servers in the 00,000 to m. Sequent had above 10,000 installations worldwide, and in 1998 it introduced the NUMACenter mixed Unix and Windows NT targeted at the data centre. Sequent could claim to be the leader in high-end Intel hardware, although such a claim would of course be disputed by NCR.

In its last reported quarter, the first quarter of fiscal 1999, Sequent announced revenue of 94.0 million and net income of .2 million. In had set up an ASP nursery and was collaborating with IBM and SCO on Monterey, a new version of Unix, which would converge the capabilities of the different Unix offerings from each of the vendors.

For IBM the merger is complementary. IBM has done well at the top end of the Unix market and has also established itself in the Windows NT market with its Netfinity range of hardware. However the Sequent NUMACenter must have looked very attractive to IBM as must some of the key customers that Sequent had attracted. Additionally, IBM did not have the close relationship with Intel that Sequent has. On the other side of the coin, Sequent was not growing dramatically and was finding the competition tough especially from IBM itself.

This move by IBM leaves it dominant in the UNIX MPP (Massively Parallel Processing) market and will help IBM in its push into the new ebusinesses, some of which were running on Sequent hardware