IBM is turning up the heat on Oracle/Sun
and HP, with a new financing program with special terms for customers who trade
their Oracle/Sun and HP equipment to migrate to selected IBM
equipment.
IBM says it is offering attractive lease
terms and no payments until 2011 for credit-qualified U.S.
customers that trade in Oracle/Sun and HP systems to migrate to IBM’s
new Power family of servers.
“We’ve had 500 customers move from competitive systems to IBM
Power systems in the first half of 2010,” Dan Ransdell, general manager of IBM
Global Financing, North America, tells Channel Insider.
“The Power 7 product offers power and cooling savings and maintenance savings.
It’s getting a lot of attention.”
Ransdell says today’s announcement is the first time the company has
combined the competitive migration with the deferred payment plan. It announced
another
competitive migration plan earlier this year.
“There’s a lot of uncertainty now on the future product plans with a lot of
our competitors,” Ransdell tells Channel Insider, citing the distracting battle
between HP and Oracle/Sun over ex-HP CEO Mark Hurd, among other
issues. “We announced Power 7 for both the high end and low end. We are
clear on our product direction and where we are headed with it.”
The new IBM Global Financing program is
designed to help customers easily and affordably acquire new midrange and
high-end IBM Power Systems, according to IBM.
IBM will provide clients with trade-in
credit for their old Oracle-Sun and HP equipment, which can be applied to the
new Power Systems lease payments. Additionally, credit-qualified clients can
benefit from interest-free payment deferral and avoid payments until 2011 on
their new Power Systems.
That’s important today as purchase decisions have generally moved from the CIO
to the CFO who is looking for an accounting of return on investment. Deferred
payments and leases enable customers to pay as they gain the value of the
equipment rather than put down all the money up front before they realize any
value.
IBM says its new high-end Power systems
are designed to manage the most demanding workloads and emerging
applications. The new systems – servers, software and IBM
PowerVM virtualization capabilities – allow customers to better manage
ever-increasing amounts of data and to conserve energy and floor space in
burdened data centers, according to IBM.
