Not only would a potential IBM and Sun union bring together the companies’ hardware, software and services, but also impressive R&D arsenals.
IBM last year became the first company to be awarded more than 4,000 U.S. patents in a year, as it stretched its streak of leading the patent pack to 16 years.
For its part, Sun finished at No. 34 with 509 U.S. patents. Not shabby, but did finish behind the likes of HP, Microsoft, Cisco and Intel.
Both IBM and Sun, of course, have prolific research groups. IBM Research‘s interests range from clean water to bringing the brain’s processing power to computers to ensuring that social networking sites adhere to strict policy rules.
Sun Labs includes efforts into large scale distributed storage (Celeste), wireless sensors and the transfer of game-like virtual reality to business settings, such as through Project Wonderland.
Sun and IBM also join forces on the research front from time to time, such as in their mutual support of the Reliable Adaptive Distributed Systems Laboratory (RAD Lab), a 3-year-old outfit at UC Berkeley focused on cloud computing.
For 2008, IBM invested $6.4 billion in R&D (about 6% of its $103.6 billion in revenue), up from $6.15 billion in 2007. IBM has invested $50 billion-plus in R&D since 2000.
Sun, meanwhile, dedicated $1.8 billion to R&D, or about 13.2% of its $13.9 billion in net revenue, down from $2 billion in each of the previous two years.
