IBM's p690 Turbo Unix server, newly overhauled with faster processors and other components, posted a score of 681,000 transactions per minute on the Transaction Processing Performance Council's TPC-C test. It edged ahead of the 658,000 score posted two weeks ago by Hewlett-Packard's Superdome running Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 operating system.

"I saw (Microsoft CEO) Steve Ballmer stand in front of a German audience and crow that they had TPC-C bragging rights. Well, they don't," said RedMonk analyst James Governor.

Microsoft isn't the only company taking a hit from the test result. Big Blue has long used Oracle's database software for its TPC-C testing, but in a significant strategic shift, the company this time used its own DB2 product.

"It certainly underscores software's ascendance within IBM, not just from a marketing perspective but from a technology perspective," Governor said. "If the database wasn't good enough, IBM server folks would not be pushing it."

The move also pulls the rug out from underneath Oracle's marketing effort, which will no longer be able to boast that IBM was forced to use Oracle's software when trying to wring the last scrap of performance out of a system during benchmark testing, he added.