The European Commission has announced the opening of two antitrust investigations against the U.S. computer giant IBM, suspected abuse of dominant position in the server market.

"The European Commission has decided to open formal antitrust investigations against IBM Corporation in two separate cases of alleged breaches of EU rules on abuse of dominant position in the market," said the EU executive in a statement.

"The two cases," she added, "are related to behavior of IBM in the market for central servers," which weighs, equipment and operating systems including about 8.5 billion worldwide, including three billion in the European Economic Area.

The central servers are powerful computers used by many large companies and government institutions in the world to store and process critical information.

The software manufacturers penalized

The first investigation follows complaints filed against IBM by two vendors say emulation technology, the U.S. in Q3 2009 and the French Hercules Turbo this year. According to these two companies, the software giant would link its central server hardware and its own operating system these servers.

IBM, by not allowing customers the freedom to use the systems of their choice on the equipment of their choice, would penalize manufacturers of software to improve performance on computers of other brands.

As to the second inquiry, the Commission stated that it was launched on its own initiative.Its services suspect indeed a "discriminatory conduct" IBM "vis-à-vis its competitors who provide maintenance services of central servers" fast payday loan no faxing."By restricting or delaying access to spare parts that IBM is the sole supplier, American society, Brussels is concerned, could foreclose its competitors from the market.

Two investigations "without merit" for IBM

The U.S. computer giant, IBM, Judge "without merit" the two investigations announced Monday by the European Commission for abusing its dominant position in the market for central servers, a market "for it was dead" until recently.

In a statement, IBM claims that "there are few, experts in high technology and IBM's competitors were pronounced dead at the central server market", and "many companies abandoned it or developing alternatives" .

Conversely, "IBM has taken a crucial decision: to invest billions of dollars" in this technology "to bring him an unprecedented level of speed, reliability and security for the enterprise market," the statement added. He continued: "Today, the central server market is a small niche in the highly competitive landscape of servers," he says.

IBM therefore accuses "some competitors who have not been able to earn their place on the market through investments" to want to do this using regulators. "The accusations against IBM TurboHercules and T3 are driven by some of the biggest competitors of IBM, led by Microsoft, (…) who want to emulate certain aspects of IBM mainframe servers without having to make substantial investments IBM has done and continues to do, "concludes the group. "They thus violate its intellectual property."