IBM
Aims For The Mid-Market
IBM
used its PartnerWorld event in New Orleans this week to confirm a
strong commitment to its partners – ISVs, distributors, resellers,
systems integrators, and consultants – and a deepening interest in
the SMB (small and medium business) market.
The
emphasis starts with what IBM refers to as the mid-market –
customers with hundreds (but less than 1,000) employees.
This is a market with a much higher growth rate than IBM’s
traditional Global 2000 market (which has a flat-to-low single
digits growth rate). At
PartnerWorld, IBM noted that 54% of IT spending comes from
businesses with fewer than 1,000 employees.
To
further these efforts, IBM is continuing its program of providing
its middleware (infrastructure software that sits between the
operating system and customers’ applications) in configurations
and at prices targeted to the mid-market.
IBM
already offered WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere Portal in
Express versions, suitable for medium-sized organizations. They will now be joined by similarly featured products for
data base (DB2 Express), systems management (Tivoli), and
collaboration (Lotus).
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DB2
Express will be priced at less than $1,000 and will be
available in the 2nd Quarter.
ISVs will be able to embed it in applications so that users
can install it as part of an application.
It will be offered on the Linux and Windows platforms.
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IBM Tivoli Storage Resource Manager
Express manages small and medium sized businesses storage
environments, installs quickly (in as little as 15 minutes) and
helps improve ROI on storage hardware through increased capacity
utilization, simplified administration, lower costs, and reduced
risk of application downtime and will . It
will be available in the second quarter
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Lotus will offer several Express bundles for mid-market
organizations with unlimited access to collaborative
applications via a web browser or a separately purchased Notes
client. Both
offerings deliver the same enterprise grade messaging, group
calendaring and off-the-shelf or custom application support
provided by standard Lotus Domino products.
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In
this market, customers demand that products be easy to integrate and
implement, so these products are designed to work together. As part of extended families of enterprise class products,
customers can move up to more advanced versions of the products if
their computing needs increase in volume or complexity.
The
offerings are designed to appeal to the SMB market in a variety of
other ways:
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Leverage
existing investments
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Be
part of solutions in typical areas such as accounting,
customer relationship management, and supply chain management
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Employ
IBM’s autonomic computing features to provide
self-configuring, self-healing, self-protecting, and
self-optimizing systems
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IBM
has already received strong support for initial WebSphere Express
offerings from mid-market partners, with over 1,000 partners already
participating in Linux and Windows offerings.
IBM is now adding an i-Series (AS/400) offering and will
offer AIX, Solaris, and HP-UX support by mid-year.
New Technology
In
addition to dazzling PartnerWorld attendees with Cirque de Soleil
showmanship (IBM Is now a sponsor) and economic predictions from
pundit Stewart Varney, IBM also showed off a new piece of
not-yet-productized technology.
The
Meta Pad is a 9-ounce highly portable miniature personal computer,
designed to move from a phone or PDA to a laptop or desktop, using
the keyboard, display and other facilities of its host.
It’s not a computer on its own, but rather a tiny systems
unit that allows a user to take all his data with him.
The device can automatically synch with desktops or servers.
Researcher
Ken Ocheltree pointed out that the device could be used to build
servers where each user had his own highly personal device.
IBM
has no plans to market or productize the technology, but may license
it.
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