Re: What's your definition of "competitive"?
As an ex UNIX sysadmin, a lot of this resonates with me, but I have to tell you, you are fighting a battle that most customers and buyers have long moved on from. You might not like it, I might not like it, but its the cold hard truth.
>> IBM's solution has superior resiliency features to anything offered by Intel or AMD
True 10 years ago - not in any meaningful way now. Xeon and Epyc have largely caught up on the CPU resiliency features apart from a few corner cases. IBM still get the advantage of owning the whole hardware/firmware/hypervisor/OS stack (at least assuming the customer isn't deploying SAP HANA in which case you have to use Linux for Power which is let's face it even more of a boutique product than Linux for Itanium was). But for the price you pay, an x86 implementation can afford to deliver resiliency in other ways. Long story short hardware reliability isn't usually the weak link in the chain these days.
>> They care about TCO - i.e. how much does everything cost
When TCO models take into account the cost of IBM support, and the cost of finding those IBM specialists to manage the kit, it rarely works out lower cost than hiring ten-a-penny Linux and VMware admins (with apologies to those folks - this isn't how I think, but it is how decision makers think)
>> Licensing costs for enterprise applications like SAP or Oracle can easily dwarf the hardware price.
1. Everyone is moving off Oracle as fast as they can - sure there are those who are stuck or those who have Stockholm Syndrome, but this isn't a growing market. It's a shrinking market.
2. SAP isn't licensed per socket or per core, so it's of no consequence there. Everyone on SAP is moving from databases licensed per socket/core to HANA which again isn't.
TL:DR the best tech rarely wins. Power 10 will do well with existing IBM customers who have deep pockets, but it will continue to slowly slide to a similar position to IBM's System Z portfolio. A fantastic money-earner for IBM and super-important for their small and decreasing number of big customers, but pretty much irrelevant for 99% of folks in IT.