Those assessments can be pricey when not discounted. For a customer with 1,000 employees, the assessment would cost “certainly five figures or more,” Gottsegen says.

HP offers to Sun customers include zero-percent leases and deferred payments for up to 90 days on new HP leases; a 15% trade-in credit when replacing Sparc with Integrity and ProLiant servers; 30% off training and support; and 50% to 85% off the HP-UX 11i operating system with a Solaris trade-in.

Dell is in the market for Sun customers as well, having offered to abandon Sun hardware on April 14, just before the Oracle-Sun acquisition was announced.

When contacted by Network World, Sun declined to comment on rival vendors’ overtures to their customers.

Since the Oracle deal was announced, Handy says IBM has converted about 100 Sun server customers and 100 Sun storage customers, although some single customers are counted in both of those groups. Handy predicted that IBM will be able to lure away many of Sun’s biggest customers and said “our third-quarter pipeline is gigantic.” HP’s Gottsegen says his company has converted more than 100 Sun customers in the past six months and that sales teams are seeing a “lot of activity” since the Oracle/Sun acquisition was announced.