The first is IBM, which is looking to capitalize on Oracle's planned $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun with yet another program to convince Sun Unix server customers to migrate to IBM Power Systems.

Sun on Tuesday reported a 26 percent drop in overall server sales volume compared with the same period last year. Its x64-based server business fared somewhat better, as volume dropped 14 percent.

As a result, Sun's overall systems revenue fell 29 percent for the quarter, with its SPARC enterprise server revenue falling 28 percent and its x64-based server revenue falling 22 percent.

IBM, sensing blood, is doubling the dollar amount it is offering customers to $8,000 per SPARC, UltraSPARC or SPARC64 microprocessor core used in Sun or Fujitsu servers, which customers then replace with a Power System.

That could add up to $64,000 in migration services for a single Sun Fire V890 server with eight microprocessor cores, said Charlie Gitomer, IBM's Power Systems marketing manager.

Upgrading a couple servers could easily result in enough reward dollars, maybe $80,000 or more, to do a major migration of four 20-TB data bases, Gitomer said. "That's a lot of migration," he said. "And it's done with experienced people."

IBM is claiming that it has helped 1,640 customers migrate from Sun, HP and other platforms to IBM over the past three years, and that nearly half of those migrations have been from Sun platforms to IBM Power Systems, helping IBM become the fastest-growing Unix server provider.

It's a pity that the Unix part of the server business is the fastest-falling part of the overall server market.

Anecdotal evidence from talking to solution providers over the years suggests, however, that programs aimed at migrating server customers to a completely new platform seldom, if ever, result in any more than the occasional success.

This is because the cost of the servers is typically the least significant part of the cost of an overall migration. Customers and their solution providers also need to factor in the cost of training and application porting.

As a result, such migrations typically happen only when a customer was planning to migrate anyway, such as during a huge data center refresh, or as a result of a merger or acquisition.

So, will customers look to migrate from Sun just because Sun is about to be acquired by Oracle? It's far from a certainty, especially given the widespread adoption of Oracle applications running on Sun hardware.

Now should Oracle in the near future state clearly that it is not interested in Sun's hardware, that would be an entirely different scenario altogether. For now, though, that is not the case.