HP lands more than 200 Sun server customers; customers benefit with better solutions for their business.

HP (NYSE:HPQ) (Nasdaq:HPQ) has announced that in the past 18 months more than 200 customers worldwide have chosen HP servers over Sun systems to help improve agility in the datacenter and adapt rapidly to changing business needs.

By offering a portfolio of services and incentives with the broadest industry standard-based server line, HP has gained new customers in financial services, manufacturing, retail, aerospace, bioinformatics, telecommunications and the public sector. In financial services alone, HP has won more than 40 significant deals from Sun Microsystems, Inc.

The 200 HP customer wins include Bank of Bolivariano of Ecuador, Belkin Corp., Dynamic Net, Forbes.com and The University of Hong Kong.

"Numerous Sun customers looking for more choice, lower total cost of ownership, better investment protection and a consistent long-term roadmap have chosen HP for industry-standard enterprise solutions," said Mark Hudson, vice president of marketing, Enterprise Storage and Servers, HP. "HP is winning business from Sun by addressing critical customer needs, offering a choice of operating systems and delivering the right technology at the right price. In just the past three months, we've increased the number of migrations to HP from Sun by 50 percent, moving customers to HP Integrity and ProLiant servers."

According to a 2004 META Group study, the top business drivers prompting application replacement on Sun servers are the need for improved agility and adaptability, which align closely with HP's Adaptive Enterprise strategy. Many of HP's new customers have embraced this strategy because it offers improved choice, reliability and flexibility based on industry-standard computing.

Belkin, a global leader in connectivity solutions, offers a range of innovations for the computer, electronics and mobile consumer. "When we replaced Sun Solaris with HP to run our business-critical systems, we were able to significantly reduce our total cost of ownership and deliver an average performance increase of 250 percent," said Chet Pipkin, chief executive officer, Belkin. "HP's Adaptive Enterprise approach helped us tighten the link between business and IT, so our business processes run faster and more efficiently. We're now well-positioned for continued future growth."

The Sun Eclipse Program, a comprehensive portfolio of services and incentives from HP, helps Sun customers move to Adaptive Enterprise solutions. In the Americas, HP has augmented the migration services it offers Sun customers with special incentives and system trade-ins across its industry-standard servers, with the choice of HP-UX, Linux or Microsoft Windows operating systems.

Other specific HP assurances to Sun customers in the Americas include proof-of-concept and migration assistance for qualified customers, as well as attractive incentives for education, mission-critical services, financing and hardware trade-ins. HP also introduced a special introductory offer to qualified Sun customers who are interested in HP's industry-leading blade solutions and is offering incentives in proof-of-concept services to transition to the HP BladeSystem infrastructure.