People and businesses often fear change when it comes to switching or upgrading computer systems, so it can often take more than just a good sales pitch to convince someone to switch to your product. Sun is offering trade-ins for a value up to 20% on their new server products, in exchange for older Dell systems based on the Xeon processor. This can amount to huge discounts with Sun hardware, which tends to be pretty pricey. According to sun.com, upwards of $1,900 per machine in discount, depending on what you trade in. The servers available are the Sun Fire X4100 and the X4200, Opteron-based machines.
What, exactly, does Sun plan to do with the Dell hardware they acquire through this offer? Buy-backs and trade-ins are becoming more common in the PC Vendor world, with some countries now requiring vendors to have a recycling program in place for their products. Maybe that will become a de-factor future sales pitch: Give us your old product from our competitor and we'll give you half off!