IBM beats up on HP, Sun, etc

The struggle for market leadership between IBM and HP burst out in the open on Thursday with IBM claiming that since 2004 it has replaced some 5,000 HP systems along with Sun Microsystems and EMC systems with its own.

The announcement came as part of IBM's marketing effort which has seen it launch The Migration Factory, the company's sales and marketing effort to show the benefits of its platforms. Key among the initiatives was IBM's effort to convince customers that there is value in its Series z mainframes.

According to IBM more than 150 customers have now migrated to Series z during this year. The company also claims to have mover 1,300 Power Systems customers worldwide and 2,900 storage customers worldwide, both over the past year.

Part of IBM's success, according to Doug Nielson, IBM systems consultant, is because, "customers are being more clear-headed about the cost of IT". He said that a big difference in systems now was that IBM could now migrate customers to systems that use, "one tenth the power and use one tenth the floor space of older systems".

Nielsen works with IBM mainframes an area that he believes is getting, "the right attention now".

Analyst Tony Lock of Freeform Dynamics says that he has, "seen this all before, many times".

One of the major vendors "takes a pop at one of the others and then that one pops back and on it goes".

But Lock said that he did believe there were some differences now. "They used to do this for the customers benefit but now they do it in public on the web", he said.