IBM sues over Apple poaching
IBM is suing Apple to try to block a senior tech executive jumping to the county. Mark Papermaster, who left his post as head of IBM’s blade server division, is apparently banned by his contract from joining a rival firm for a year after quitting.
A lawsuit filed by IBM in New York argues Papermaster had access to company secrets which he might be able to share with Apple. The one-year delay would take away some of this advantage.
Judging by previous similar cases, including one pitting Google and Microsoft, it may be some time before there’s a settlement. Court attitudes toward non-compete cases vary from state to state and Apple will likely want the case heard in its home state California where it stands a better chance of winning.
The two firms, while hardly blood rivals, have been on better terms in the past. IBM produced chips for Macs from 1994 until 2006 when Apple switched provider to Intel.
A blade server has many common features such as power supply and some connection ports removed; the casing used to hold servers provides the power directly. This makes the server much slimmer and thus much more attractive to firms which need a lot of servers in a small space.
Apple hiring Pagemaster probably doesn’t mean it’s looking to compete more in the server business itself. A more likely explanation is that it’s planning to increase its ‘cloud computing’ business. That’s where a firm provides services which mainly run on its own servers rather than a customer’s own computer.
Apple already provides one such service in MobileMe, and increasing such activity could require so much server power that blade servers would be a particularly efficient tactic.
The New York Times suggests Papermaster might also be able to provide technical expertise for a microprocessor design firm which Apple recently bought and plans to put to work on smaller devices such as iPhones and iPods.
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