'Ferociously loyal' users to stand by Sun

Sun Microsystems' "ferociously loyal" customer base will see the IT vendor through uncertainty following its acquisition by Oracle, according to an industry analyst.

The shock union between the two tech giants, first announced in April, has been put on hold pending an extended probe by the U.S. Department of Justice.

In a bid to take advantage of the delay, Sun's server competitor Hewlett-Packard recently unveiled discounts and offers of free migration services to urge its rival's customers to switch camps.

IBM, too, stands to benefit from customer defections. According to U.S. news reports, Big Blue has stepped up efforts to persuade customers to dump their Sun Sparc servers for IBM, upping the amount of free migration services offered to defectors.

Analysts have also cautioned against investing in new offerings from the Oracle-Sun marriage until the merger has been finalized and a roadmap released.

But, customer loyalty will likely see Sun through its uncertain period, said Sally Parker, research director of IT, Frost & Sullivan.

Worldwide, Sun has 47,000 enterprise customers and a "ferociously loyal customer base", Parker told ZDNet Asia in a phone interview.

Furthermore, customers running Oracle stand to benefit from the software vendor's pending control over the Solaris platform. These customers can expect to see more features out on Solaris faster, with other platforms being placed "second tier", with regard to Oracle releases, she noted.

"It wouldn't be surprising to see Oracle software showing up first in Solaris," she said.

Migration is painful
Above all, platform migration brings along with it pain in the form of cost and risk involved, said Parker. Free migration offers and discounts must be sufficiently attractive to trigger the transition, but it is mostly a "very difficult argument to justify", she said.

"Unix is a trusted workhorse for mission-critical workloads. For a large percentage of [enterprise] customers, the interruption of downtime is not an option or at best extremely difficult to justify, so the transition to a new environment must be a very compelling one," she explained.

There is also less reason to switch between Unix flavors because the platform has matured over the last 20 years, resulting in many common features across the OS variations, she said.

According to IDC figures, as of March 2009, IBM leads the worldwide Unix server market with a 37.2 percent market share. Sun ranks second at 28.1 percent, followed by HP at 26.5 percent. Unix systems accounted for 36 percent of the overall server market revenue in the fourth quarter of last year, said IDC.

Lee Lit-Voon, IBM's Asean systems and technology group director, said in an e-mail interview that the number of Sun customers migrating to IBM doubled in the second quarter, over the first quarter of this year.

These transitions were evident particularly in Sun's main customer base comprising telcos, financial services companies and government agencies, Lee said, pointing to India-based Sun TV Network as an example of a customer that switched to IBM from Sun.

Over the past three years, IBM migrated some 1,800 customers from competitors including Sun and HP, he added.

Both Oracle and Sun declined to respond to queries from ZDNet Asia. HP was unable to respond by press time.