IBM entices clients of Oracle DBMS: new bonuses

IBM tries to entice users of databases and the middleware of Oracle using the whole series of new marketing tricks.

In particular, IBM provides a detailed financial analysis to clients of Oracle which shows how much they will be able to save, having switched to IBM DB2 and the IBM WebSphere application server. Besides, technical assessments as far as use of software from IBM is simpler are provided to them.

Besides, IBM is ready to show both in the laboratories, and based on data centers of clients of advantage of the concept. Besides, the vendor provided about 100 courses of retraining for technical specialists of Oracle where they can gain full knowledges about technologies of IBM, said in the statement of the last.

The director of the strategy of IBM Bernie Spang said that all listed actions are absolutely free for the enterprises wishing to take part in the program. Moreover, the Blue giant developed special financial conditions for the switching clients of Oracle among which there is, for example, zero payment by installments at acquisition of software for 12 months.

IBM claims that within the program of migration for clients of Oracle it already achieved considerable progress. Last year, according to own data of the company, more than 1 thousand clients of Oracle DBMS selected DB2, and more than 400 clients of Oracle WebLogic Server passed to WebSphere. By the way, among the last - Deutsche Postbank and divisions of the Russian company "Gazprom Neft".

However, as Speng fairly was recognized, these digits need to be considered under the correct corner. A part of the companies really carried out large-scale migrations, and a part just refused outdated software of Oracle at start of new IT projects. Also statistics of IBM does not reflect percent of the companies which on the contrary migrated with DBMS] from IBM in Oracle DBMS and other competing companies.

At the same time IBM notes considerable profit on implementation of the program. Some ex-clients of Oracle saved up to 30% of the budget within three years together with cost reduction on power supply and cooling, the top manager of IBM says.

And though migration of databases not the simplest process, in last years IBM made a number of changes in DB2 which allowed to simplify it. The special layer of compatibility using which the applications written under Oracle DBMS can work at DB2 without entering into them of any significant changes concerns them, for example. "It changed migration economy radically", - said Seng.

The initiative of IBM reflects growth of the competition from Oracle which got access to the market hardware means after purchase of SUN Microsystems. Oracle at the same time places emphasis on sales of the end-to-end integrated systems including both the hardware, and layers of the middleware and directly business applications. In this segment IBM feels more weakly.

The lack of own ERP system remains a sore point for IBM. But instead of acquisition of any platform or development of own IBM still stakes on partnership with the companies like Lawson Software or SAP.

At the same time the relations of IBM and SAP were heated lately as the last works on porting of the flagman ERP system of SAP Business Suite for the Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) database which got to SAP owing to Sybase purchase.