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To: Mr. Big who wrote (1165)	1/10/2001 8:52:09 AM
From: 2MAR$	Respond to of 6445

IBM Steals $15 Billion Customer From Sun SG COWEN SAYS SUN MICROSYSTEMS<SUNW.O> LIKELY TO FACE INCREASED COMPETITION Jan 09, 2001 (Tech Web - CMP via COMTEX) -- IBM Corp. is set to announce Wednesday that it has persuaded a $15 billion refining firm to swap out its line of servers and storage from Sun Microsystems Inc. in favor of IBM products. Ultramar Diamond Shamrock Corp., San Antonio, estimated it saved approximately 10 percent in IT costs in switching back to IBM (stock: IBM) equipment, according to Doris Beaulieu, the company's CIO. Beaulieu said Sun (stock: SUNW) fell prey to the same flaw that originally caused IBM to lose the Ultramar account five years ago. "Sun assumed that we would never move from the Sun environment to IBM," he said. "They thought we were crazy to do that. They weren't giving us a very good response in terms of cost, and IBM was more aggressive on the other end." The shift also underscores the vicious battle for marketshare and mindshare in the enterprise IT space. In December, IBM announced that Telia, a Scandinavian telecom, had also shifted its IT infrastructure from Sun to IBM S/390 boxes. Sun, in response, has issued statements that it powers half of the top 50 U.S. universities, as ranked by U.S. News & World Report. Officials at Sun, Mountain View, Calif., said Sun equipment is still present at Ultramar. "IBM did win in an application area, but Ultramar Diamond continues to be a big customer for Sun," according to a company spokesman. "They still run a number of applications, and remain a valued customer." Ultramar will install two IBM RS/6000 S80 enterprise servers, eight RS/6000 midrange servers, and a 5.3-Gbyte Shark storage system. Beaulieu replaced 50 leased Sun systems in the process, including a combination of Sun Enterprise 3500, 4500 and 450 servers. Beaulieu estimated that he will slim down the number of servers from 50 to 10, from 760 to 160 disk drives, and from 250 to 56 CPUs, carving out room for his firm to grow. "Cost is first, second is flexibility," Beaulieu said. "With the invested equipment, I'm in a position to be able to grow by four times," a capability that will likely be used when Ultramar upgrades its software, he said. "I'm not saying Sun isn't a good company," Beaulieu added. "They're a very good company ... they just didn't believe we would move." techweb.com Copyright (C) 2001 CMP Media Inc.