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With each earnings release Oracle usually likes to take a poke at its arch-rival SAP by touting how many more customer wins it had in the quarter or how many SAP customers converted over to Oracle software.
The self-promotion goes hand-in-hand with Oracle chief Larry Ellison’s character and has come to be expected. But it doesn’t fit so well with IBM’s corporate culture.
That’s why an announcement by IBM this week seems a little out of character. IBM announced that it had managed to convince more than 200 customers to move their critical business and storage systems off Sun Microsystems and HP hardware and onto IBM products in the fourth quarter of 2009.
The success, it said, was in part due to a “Migration Factory” program the company established four years to help move clients over to IBM systems. Furthermore, it says more than 800 customers migrated to IBM Power Systems, System x and System z servers and storage offerings in 2009, including nearly 550 from Sun and 250 from HP.
IBM has the right to tout its success, but lately it hasn’t needed to do so. Analyst firms have been painting a clear enough picture.
In its last quarterly Worldwide Server Tracker survey, research firm IDC stated that IBM gained four points of revenue share in the fourth quarter of 2009 in the Power Systems category. IBM increased its revenue in the category by more than $200 million, primarily by winning customers from other vendors.
IDC also noted that its System x systems gained three points in market share, marking the fourth consecutive quarter of share gains.
While I am somewhat surprised to see IBM issuing a “we win, they lose” press release, this could set the stage for some fun down the road. Now that Oracle has finally won European Union approval for its takeover of Sun Microsystems, Larry Ellison and company can work in earnest to stop the bleeding of market share at Sun. Knowing Oracle’s past history for touting its successes, you can bet it will take some glee in knocking some of wind out of IBM’s sails.
Sun is in rough shape and IBM – and HP, and Dell for that matter- have used the uncertainty of the past year to steal customers in a very tough market. But Sun isn’t out of it yet. Sun remains the world’s fourth largest server vendor by revenue, behind IBM, HP and Dell, with about 9.5% of the market.
Now that IBM has thrown down the gauntlet, it will be fun to watch the other server vendors respond. This has all the makings of an entertaining Server Smackdown.
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