IBM Extends And Tweaks Power Systems Deal In Europe

December 3, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Big Blue has made a number of tweaks to a long-running deal that has been effect on Power Systems iron in Europe. Actually, it made a bunch of tweaks in the past several months, but they were just not obvious to us here at The Four Hundred up here in the Big Apple. (That would be me alone. Ah-hem.)

In announcement letter ENUSZA12-1003, you can see all of the changes in the 2012 Power Trade In Program, which was extended to run until December 31 of this year back in July when the PowerLinux 7R2 machine was added to the deal.

And let me say one thing here. Kudos to the good people of IBM Europe who sensibly put a track changes section in the announcement letter that shows the date when changes to the deal were made and what those changes were. The U.S. and European parts of IBM do not do this, which makes you go back and compare a half-dozen nearly identical documents to see what the heck is different. That is perfectly idiotic, and the way the Europeans as well as the Kiwis and Aussies do it is just plain sensible. And I thank you. If I could let you run IBM, I would.

As in other deals IBM has made available across the world, this European one gives customers trading in vintage Power-based servers bearing the AS/400 and RS/6000 brands and their successors as well as those trading in Unix and proprietary systems from Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, and Fujitsu rebates that range from $1,500 to $5,000 if they get rid of that old iron. The size of the rebate is based on the new Power Systems machine you buy, which can range from a Power 710 up to a Power 750. In November, the deal was updated to include the Power 570 (9117-MMA) machine and to include all of the former territories controlled by France.

The deal is one of the levers that IBM has been using to get customers to move off Sparc and Itanium iron to Power Systems. Odds are that it will be updated in 2013 to help promote sales of Power7+ systems, whenever the entry and midrange boxes come out.