IBM's Oracle rebate counters HP, Sun

After Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems announced significant deals with Oracle in recent months, IBM is striking back with rebates of as much as $300,000 for software from the database giant.

HP Chief Executive Mark Hurd announced broader software support and favorable pricing from Oracle in March--and got Oracle CEO Larry Ellison to endorse its Itanium servers with the words, "There is no more important platform for Oracle than HP and Itanium."

The move came after a January meeting with Ellison and Sun CEO Scott McNealy, who announced an alliance to resell Oracle software with major discounts for customers. HP and Sun both singled out IBM, which sells database and commerce software that competes with Oracle products, as a target for their programs.

On Tuesday, IBM told customers about its own promotion for those switching from competitors' systems to Big Blue's Power processor-based pSeries servers.

Rebates for Oracle software include $1,000 for a p5-520 with two 1.9GHz processor cores; $25,000 for a p5-570 with 16 2.2GHz cores; $160,000 for a p5-595 with 16 1.6GHz cores; and $300,000 for a top-end p5-595 with 64 1.9GHz cores.

IBM said the program began Tuesday and listed no end date.

[scdecade]

Uh this hardly offsets Oracle's discounts

Oracle is about $20k per core per year. How does a $1,000 to $10,000 discount per core on IBM hardware "counter" Sun?

Forget about HP and Itanic. They're exiting the Unix business.