200 Storage Customers Switch to IBM From Sun and HP in 4Q09

IBM Corp. announced that more than 200 customers moved critical business workloads to IBM systems and storage from Sun Microsystems and HP systems in the fourth quarter of 2009. IBM also unveiled new software that helps customers accelerate and automate their migration projects.

Since IBM established its Migration Factory program four years ago to help clients move to IBM systems, nearly 2,200 companies have switched to IBM systems and storage from Sun and HP. In 2009, more than 800 customers migrated to IBM Power Systems, System x and System z servers and storage solutions, including nearly 550 from Sun and nearly 250 from HP.

Based on hundreds of migrations from competitive systems to IBM, IBM developers have created new software tools that automate many of the manual processes to help accelerate Sun migrations. This software automatically discovers and identifies the Sun assets, provisions the new target IBM environment, and streamlines workload transitions – optimized across hardware, software and processes.

The software can speed migrations from Sun Solaris to Linux or AIX, IBM’s UNIX operating system, as well as applications and middleware to IBM systems. This workload-centric methodology has shortened the provisioning step from weeks to days for some clients.

Customers are turning to IBM for risk-mitigation in moving off Sun and HP platforms and for IBM’s long-term investments in integrated systems – industry-leading hardware, systems software and middleware – and stable, innovative product roadmaps, producing systems that are designed for emerging workloads such as business analytics.

For UNIX servers, IBM has gained 12 points of revenue share in the past five years through 3Q09 according to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, and IBM stated that it gained four points of revenue share in 4Q09 for Power Systems. IBM increased the revenue generated from Power Systems from competitive displacements of customers, primarily Sun and HP, to more than $200 million in 4Q 2009. This amounts to more than $600 million in sales from UNIX competitive takeouts for IBM in 2009.

IBM also stated that System x took three points of share in the 4Q09, marking the fourth consecutive quarter of share gains. And IBM reported that its storage business gained share in 4Q09.

In 2009, more than 200 customers migrated from HP software to IBM software representing a 200 percent year-over-year revenue increase.

IBM has moved customers from competitive systems to IBM systems in industries such as financial services, telecommunications, public sector, healthcare, retail, and mid-market.