Sun Beefs Up Program To Steal HP Customers

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based, Sun expanded its "HP Away" migration program to include its workstations and servers that run Sun's Solaris operating system on Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s 64-bit Opteron chip. The company already includes servers based on Solaris and Sun's Sparc chip.

Sun is looking to take advantage of a stumbling HP in the enterprise server and storage market. The Palo Alto, Calif., company announced last week that it missed Wall Street expectations in the third quarter, primarily due to a 5 percent drop in revenue, year to year, for enterprise servers and storage. HP Chief Executive Carly Fiorina called the results "unacceptable" and fired three top executives.

Market researcher Gartner Inc. said in a research note that IBM is exerting pressure on HP in the server market, and Sun "threatens to recover market share."

"HP's NonStop and Alpha systems operate in a market that has been declining as companies increasingly favor more open solutions," Gartner said.

Under the Sun program, companies moving from HP can buy Sun servers won't have to make any payments or pay any interest until 2005, company officials said. HP customers migrating to Sun's AMD Opteron servers running Solaris will get a 40 percent discount.

Launched in the summer of 2003, the program has lured more than 150 HP customers, according to Sun.

IBM said it has launched its own offensive to win HP customers as well.

Material from CRN was used in this report.

This story courtesy of TechWeb .