special_financing

IBM’s announcement describes the financing options, but it very simply breaks down like this:

If your customers have old HP or Oracle-Sun equipment, they can trade-in and select new Power family of servers. The ploy is to try and make mid-range and high-end IBM Power Systems more accessible and more affordable for target customers. IBM also is lending a hand to “clients that…are worried about fuzzy, uncertain product road maps” with easy upgrade paths. IBM’s Power Systems, both server and software, have PowerVM technology, for virtualization and dealing with large quantities of data, and are apparently designed for ease of management between interconnected data.

There’s also the IBM lease program, in which IBM details that clients can “turn on” additional processing capacity in the Power 770, 780 and 795 systems as needed, without disruption to the overall system.

In recent months, both HP and IBM have introduced special upgrade, migration and financing programs aimed at recruiting Sun customers into either the HP or IBM product lines, respectively. Some customers have defected from Sun, but there haven’t been major reports of defections. Moreover, Sun rapidly returned to profitability following Oracle’s buyout of the company.

Additional reporting by Joe Panettieri. Sign up for The VAR Guy’s Newsletter; Webcasts and Resource Center; and via RSS; Facebook;   Identi.ca; Twitter and VARtweet.