The strategy will also affect channel partners, Eunice said. "Systems integrators used to get paid for a lot of that legwork and elbow grease; they're not going to get paid for that nearly as much if the vendors do the integration," Eunice said.

One partner selected by IBM to appear at its event said that won't be the case. "It's positive for us because the systems are focused on faster time to market," said Matthew Castle, a managing director at Perficient, an IT consulting firm in Cupertino, California. Channel partners will still have a role to play, he said, in extending the data models and reports that IBM provides for analytics, for example.

IBM is clearly targeting Oracle with the new products. Its executives, normally reserved with competitive claims, cited industry benchmarks intended to show how IBM's hardware can outperform Oracle's. "This is unusual for us to be so direct," admitted Arvind Krishna, general manager for information management with IBM's software group.

IBM also announced it is making US$500 million in loans available to Sun channel partners if they want to migrate over to selling IBM systems.

IBM picked three customers to appear with it on stage here, all of whom said they had migrated from Oracle's database to IBM's, and in some cases from Sun to IBM hardware. Cormac Burke, director of SAP applications at PacificCorp., delivered just the message that IBM wants people to hear. The utility company migrated away from Oracle because of its "increasingly hostile" relationship with SAP, he said.