There's nothing better for customers than competitors who don't let anything slide. Mel Beckman talked about corporate competition within organizations [2] yesterday — definitely catch it if you missed it — but the real game-changing action usually comes when closely matched competitors take off the gloves.

In this case, it's long-time System i high-availability provider Lakeview Technology [3] against the new Vision Solutions-iTera [4] company. I'm not saying that high-availability competition has never existed before, but it's safe to say the relatively new disaster recovery/HA upstart iTera changed the dynamics when it first jumped in the ring with Vision, Lakeview, and DataMirror [5] and started gaining momentum with new accounts during the last few years.

In any event, Lakeview has announced a Safe Passage Program, which it's billing as an alternative to Vision-iTera customers who might be worrying about product and service transitions after the merger. The Safe Passage Program is based on Lakeview's MIMIX software, an important "no capital outlay" subscription plan, and on-demand global Lakeview support.

Lakeview's move to snatch customers during the merger isn't new — Lawson and SAP created similar plans to grab J.D. Edwards and PeopleSoft customers after Oracle acquired PeopleSoft. The strategy works: SAP reported picking up 200 new customers with its Safe Passage plans earlier this year.

The most important point is that Lakeview isn't going away, and if the new Vision stumbles — and we're not saying it will or won't — other vendors are ready to swoop in. That's good for customers, certainly, but the best product of competition is yet to come: solution innovation.