Sun offers a hand to confused HP-UX customers

Not satisfied with its assault on HP’s Tru64 customer base, Sun Microsystems has made a move to go after HP-UX customers as well, offering them a
“risk free” move to SPARC-based or Opteron-based hardware.

For several months now, Sun has been trying to convince old DEC and Compaq users to come over to the Solaris camp. The basic premise of the program is
that HP customers have to move somewhere as the company kills off its AlphaServer/Tru64 product line. So Sun steps in with some free consulting to
show how much a port to Solaris will cost and then it promises to meet certain application performance objectives. There are hardware financing
benefits as well.

Now Sun thinks it can extend this program to the HP-UX customer base.

“HP has been exasperating their user base,” said Larry Singer, Sun’s head of global market strategies. “The reality is that just like with Tru64,
there is a huge pent up demand for HP customers wanting to move to another RISC (vendor).”

For the past three years, HP has been calling on its user base to move off of Alpha and PA-RISC-based servers and onto boxes running on Intel’s
Itanium processor. This shift is especially painful for Tru64 customers with HP axing the OS and delaying the timetable for moving some Tru64
technology into HP-UX, which runs on Itanium.