IBM boasts hundreds of Sun migrations

IBM has said that over 200 of its customers migrated business-critical systems from Sun Microsystems and HP to IBM systems in the last quarter of 2009.

The announcement came just a day before Oracle is due to reveal its roadmap for Sun products, suggesting that IBM is hoping to capitalise on uncertainty among Sun customers.

IBM claimed that 550 Sun customers moved across to its products in the whole of 2009, and said that competitive displacements of customers, primarily from Sun and HP, passed a value of US$200m ($223m) in the fourth quarter of 2009.

Big Blue also unveiled new software for its Migration Factory program designed to automatically discover and identify Sun assets, provision the target IBM infrastructure and streamline workload transitions.

The software is designed to speed migrations from Sun Solaris to Linux or AIX, IBM's Unix operating system, as well as applications and middleware to IBM systems.

IBM tried to buy Sun Microsystems last year, but the deal was unsuccessful after the two firms failed to agree terms. Orcale today announced its acquisition of Sun had finally been completed.