HP trumpets Linux to woo Sun customers
Hewlett-Packard garnered $75 million in revenue in 2003 with a program that encourages customers of rival Sun Microsystems to move to HP servers that run Linux, the company said Wednesday.
The program, which offers $25,000 worth of migration services, attracted 50 customers since it launched in October, Efrain Rovira, HP's worldwide director of Linux marketing, said at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo.
"We think that's a great turnout," Rovira said. All 50 customers were new to HP, he said.
Sun countered that it had been successful in attracting HP customers--those who used the Tru64 version of Unix, in particular.
"When it announced the end of life of Alpha/Tru64, HP left hundreds of thousands of customers with no other choice but to undergo a costly migration to an unproven platform," Sun spokeswoman Sabrina Guttman said. "Sun's HP Away program, which attracted over 50 customers away from HP in a single quarter last year, offers these abandoned customers with the long-term roadmap and predictable release cycle of our SPARC/Solaris systems."
