IBM has been looking out for a stake in Satyam for the past three-four years with almost a close touch-and-go in 2006, which is one of the two to bidders have accessed the data centre, CNBC-TV18 reported citing unnamed sources.

In the last board meeting, former Satyam chief Ramalinga Raju had mentioned to the board of directors how he thought Satyam would be a hostile takeover candidate by IBM. So they have been looking at Satyam for some time right now and finally they have thrown their hat in the ring.

If IBM is successful, it first has Satyam's 40,000-odd employees in its armour, which, when combined with the presence that IBM already has in India, takes its employee strength to over one lakh employees. That is close to TCS' and Infosys' headcount.

IBM has a strong back-end presence and delivery expertise in both Oracle and SAP and finally, it gets a host of customers for that. It could be a challenge too - as these Satyam customers would be smaller in size than what IBM is used to. IBM will then too need to do some customer upgradation and data mining.

A whole host of analysts are also of the view that at this point in time IBM will be able to take care of both Sun and Satyam at the same time because its hardware acquisition, which is Sun, and here it is looking at a service acquisition. If both are bought at the same time - and quite cheaply, as Sun's prices too fell recently - both acquisitions would be a good buy for IBM.

IBM already has a financial backing to go with this, so most analysts are looking at this development a little positively. Satyam acquisition to propel IBM to big league of Indian IT: Forrestor Researcher

IBM has been looking out for a stake in Satyam for the past three-four years and is said to have accessed Satyam's data centre to conduct a due diligence process to take a bid forward.

John C McCarthy, VP and principal analyst, Forrester Research, said If IBM is successful then it would push the company into the top three in terms of size in India. "It puts them between a 105,000-150,000 resources, neck-and-neck with TCS and Infosys, for purely a scale point of view," reports CNBC-TV18.

On whether Satyam fits the bill for IBM, and would it be an aggressive bidder, McCarthy said," For IBM it pushes them into top three in terms of size in India. It puts them between a 105,000-150,000 resources, neck-and-neck with TCS and Infosys, from a purely scale point of view. More specifically it gives them a more formal informative goal, Oracle and SAP back-end delivery practice for implementation and running of those applications which clients are looking at as a very expensive line item.

On the class action suits against Satyam in the US influencing the cost of acquisition, he said, "I think any one of the players bidding for Satyam will have hired one or more law firms to help them assess what the risk is and figure out what their legal strategy will be dealing with those class action law suits.

Obviously, IBM because of size of resources is in as good a position to deal with that as anyone. I think part of the challenge would be because of IBM because of the name brand may, if they acquire Satyam and are chosen by the board, may attract it's own set of lawsuits in parallel. Yes, there is some good news here, but also bad news in terms of the liability issues."