"Some collateral damage to competitors in the process is not something that IBM likely regrets," Haff wrote.

Sybase's chief marketing officer, Raj Nathan, insists the company is doing fine and that its offering remains "superior to any of our competitor's offerings, including Cloudscape."

But saddled with disappointing growth in its mobile and embedded database business, Sybase is turning its to other areas, such as data integration, to boost revenue growth.

Do no wrong, do no right

Another example? Take Hewlett-Packard's backing of the open-source Lustre shared file system. Lustre helps HP in the high-performance computing arena, while hurting storage competitors like Panasas Inc. as well as current HP partners such as PolyServe Inc., says Haff.