Hewlett-Packard and IBM are aggressively picking off huge numbers of Sun customers as Oracle remains tied up in discussions with antitrust regulators over its pending acquisition of Sun. HP has been brazenly exploiting Oracle's status in legal limbo with messages saying, "HP To Sun Customers: We've Got Your Back."While Oracle's legal team has been attempting to ensure U.S. and European regulators that it will not inhibit its competitors from having full access to Sun's widely used Java programming language, "Hewlett-Packard says it persuaded more than 100 Sun customers to buy HP's servers and storage systems in the past six months," reports the the San Jose Mercury News website.

And IBM, whose equally aggressive message to Sun customers has been "Don't settle for an uncertain future," has also been blitzing those accounts, according to the mercurynews.com: "IBM Vice President Scott Handy said this week that his company had more than 250 sales "wins," in which Sun customers chose IBM products in the first half of 2009, with most coming in the second quarter."

An outline of HP's efforts to court Sun customers is here.

My guess is that Oracle will be able to wrap up its discussions with the U.S. Justice Dept. way before it gets the okay from the European Union, which has tended to take a rather jaded view of large American software companies enjoying significant success in the EU (see: Microsoft). Perhaps Oracle CEO Larry Ellison will give Bill Gates a call and ask for a few pointers on how to settle with the EU's regulators?