Looking to show that turnabout is very fair play, Sun has launched a campaign to snatch customers from HP with a "no-risk migration assessment" aimed at HP enterprise users who "are facing higher support costs, performance and availability issues, and loss of ISV support for critical business applications."The offer from Sun Professional Services says that Sun's servers, storage solutions, and "implementation services" will let HP enterprise customers do everything except solve for Pi: ". . . you can reduce complexity and support costs, enhance performance and business agility, improve asset utilization and infrastructure reliability, save money on power, cooling and real-estate and protect your applications, data and business processes."

But for all of that bark, I'm not sure just how much bite is behind the Sun effort to grab customers from HP: a fairly vigorous search of the website for Sun Professional Services failed to turn up any special program for HP enterprise customers, and the only link offered in the press release touting the "Make Your Move" campaign went to a generic registration page. That page made no mention of HP, and only sought contact information from prospects.

That's quite a contrast from the aggressive and very pointed recruitment efforts made earlier this year by Hewlett-Packard and IBM following the announcement that Sun had agreed to be acquired by Oracle. In the inevitable down time between that initial announcement and some future conclusion of the deal, HP and IBM opportunistically recruited Sun customers who, in that interim period, had to wonder about the lame-duck status of Sun and its commitment to them-or at least its ability to fulfill that commitment-until it officially became a part of Oracle.

You can read all about it in this Global CIO column, "As Regulators Jam Oracle, IBM And HP Snatch Sun Customers".

Those efforts from IBM and HP turned out extremely well for them as each company says it has snagged hundreds of deals from Sun customers, and those numbers continue to grow as the European Union in all its bountiful wisdom seems to be looking to set a world record for longest review of a proposed acquisition, which you can read about here: "Global CIO: Oracle Nailed By EU Protectionism As HP And IBM Raid Sun".

The deal was announced in late April, and those high-urgency hustlers at the EU promise that by late January they'll have at least a theme for a concept that might lead to an idea that could trigger an opinion on what they might do or not do, depending on various circumstances and possibilities that at this time of course can't be discussed or speculated upon but fear not because in good time we managers of European affairs will decide what's best for the free market and after we consult our burnt offerings we'll be sure to let you know what we've determined (or not determined, because, after all, these things are complicated, you see). For more on that disgraceful kabuki, please see "Global CIO: Can Oracle's Larry Ellison Keep MySQL From EU Whiners?".