Sun Chases HP-UX Installed Base with HP Away Campaign

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Since July of last year, Sun Microsystems and its partners have been targeting the vast installed base of Tru64 Unix users on AlphaServer iron in the hopes of rattling them enough to get a fair number of them to move from Tru64 over to Solaris on Sparc servers. So far, Sun has been able to convince 80 Tru64 customers to separate with hundreds of millions of dollars as they made the jump to Sparc/Solaris as part of the HP Away marketing campaign. Now, Sun is chasing HP-UX customers.

Those 80 customers may not sound like a lot, but Sun has been running at a rate of replacing an AlphaServer customer each business day since announcing the HP Away program. To be sure, at any given time, regardless of product roadmaps, there are always a few disgruntled users in the Unix server base. But a radical change in a server roadmap like Hewlett-Packard and Compaq instigated as part of their merger tends to increase the agitation such that it is easier to find companies willing to jump. Any time you force your own customers to think about a painful migration inside your own product lines, you leave the door open for other vendors to get their foot in. Sun is devoting time, energy, and money to the HP Away program to chase Tru64 customers, and given than they have to move from Tru64 to HP-UX, this makes sense. So why chase HP-UX customers now?

First, it is a big base. The HP-UX base is huge, with about 270,000 customers according to Sun's estimates and probably two or three times as many systems. The HP-UX base is probably a bit larger in terms of footprints than the 500,000 or so AlphaServers out there in the world, which run either OpenVMS or Tru64 Unix. It is hard to imagine that Tru64 Unix makes up more than 20 to 25 percent of the AlphaServer base. Solaris is not really an easy jump for OpenVMS shops, who make up the majority of those AlphaServer machines, but it is a more reasonable jump for those using Tru64 Unix.

Until now, despite the juiciness of the HP-UX base, Larry Singer, vice president of global strategy at Sun who is in charge of the HP Away marketing campaign, believed that it didn't make sense to chase the HP-UX installed base because HP had a pretty good handle on it. But, according to his analysis, the delays in getting HP-UX v3 out the door this year and the advent of the 64-bit Xeons undercuts the strength of the HP roadmap for the HP-UX line as it is being transitioned from HP's PA-RISC processors to Intel's Itaniums.

Singer feels rather strongly about how Sun can chase the HP-UX base now that Itanium has been called into question by the advent of 64-bit Xeons and Sun has committed to ship Solaris on Sparc, Intel, and AMD platforms. "Ordinarily, customers do not leave their platforms. Vendors just do these attack programs to irritate each other," explains Singer. "Now, it looks like nobody else is going to really ship Itanium, which is dead, and we are thinking of running HP's ads for free on Sun's site. Not only do customers have a choice, as HP says, but they have to make a choice." Meaning, move to Sun and away from HP. "HP just told its whole Unix base that it is a dead end."

That is putting it on a bit thick, of course, but that's what marketing guys are paid to do. The fact remains that Sun was expected to move only 40 customers and has 80 so far. By moving in on the HP-UX base, Sun could double its HP Away sales because of the delays in HP-UX v3 and questions about the long-term viability of Itanium, which are a concern to some HP-UX customers. Both Intel and HP have been saying that the 64-bit Xeon in no way undercuts Itanium, but even an apologist for Itanium would have to admit that the 64-bit Xeon breathes a few years more life into Xeon at the least and possibly delays the popularization of Itanium for many years across the midrange. And HP-UX is not going to be available for the 64-bit Xeon.

The HP Away deal does not target Wintel and Lintel iron, and the odds are that it will not until Sun has Opteron-based Linux systems sometime later this year that scale beyond its initial two-way foray into this market. Sun has toyed with a similar program aimed at IBM's AIX Unix server installed base called Blue Away, which was launched earlier in 2003, mostly as a joke it seems. "I'm under a lot of pressure to relaunch an AIX program," says Singer, "but I won't do it until there is a reason for AIX customers to move. I'm not into marketing for the sake of making noise. I want to make money, and if IBM fumbles the AIX ball, then I will chase it."

The HP Away program includes incentives and help to enable AlphaServer users to migrate to Sun Sparc-based servers running Solaris. Included in the program is a free two-day assessment--what Singer calls a "sales call on steroids"--to determine the cost and technical requirements for migration and a further two-week assessment service, for which Sun will consume the costs if the customer decides against the move. Sun is also offering application porting services, finance and trade-in offers and a 90-day deferred payment scheme to sweeten the move from HP to Sun hardware. And customers who sign up for a migration do not have to pay Sun a dime until the work is done and they are happy with the migration, according to Singer. If Sun can do 400 of the Tru64 and HP-UX migrations at an average value of $1 million a piece, you can bet that Sun's CEO Scott McNealy will be plenty happy, too.