The European Commission on Thursday approved International Business Machines Corp.'s $34 billion acquisition of the Raleigh, North Carolina-based software company Red Hat Inc., setting no conditions.

The Commission said the acquisition would not create any competition problems in relevant markets.

In its investigation, the Commission looked at the impact the transaction would have on the markets for middleware and system infrastructure software. Middleware is software used for making and operating enterprise application software, such as online payment processing. System infrastructure software allows companies to control hardware resources, such as servers, across enterprise application software.