Long before 5000+ people gathered early this month in Las Vegas for the annual IBM lovefest known as PartnerWorld, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) had been squarely on the radar of IBM's sales, marketing, and development teams. But the SMB shops have not always been feeling IBM's love and in fact have been a bit shy to step out on the dance floor with Big Blue. But new announcements at PartnerWorld leave no doubt that IBM is intensifying its courtship of SMB customers and is relying heavily on its Business Partners to be matchmakers.

IBM estimates that SMB shops will spend upward of $250 billion on IT in 2006 and that 20% of IBM's total revenue will come from the SMB market. The number of SMB customers (companies with between 100 and 1,000 employees) can be counted in the hundreds of thousands worldwide. Odds are that the company you work for falls squarely within the SMB demographic.

Express Advantage

At the top of the SMB announcements at PartnerWorld was a new initiative for IBM Business Partners that takes IBM's extensive stable of reasonably priced, simple-to-install Express offerings and wraps them in a new program called "Express Advantage."

IBM's current suite of 148 Express offerings includes everything from low-end iSeries, pSeries, and xSeries servers (System i, p, and x, respectively) to easy-to-implement-and-buy Tivoli, WebSphere, Lotus, and Linux offerings. With Express Advantage, IBM hopes to add value to existing and future Express offerings by giving Business Partners a real influx of support on how best to evaluate the needs of its customers in order to recommend the best total solution in terms of a combination of Express offerings, offerings from other ISVs, and services and/or support offerings from IBM and/or the partner.

For some time now, IBM has been working to move its Business Partners away from being mere resellers of point products to true value-add resellers that can professionally consult with customers on comprehensive solutions that more precisely meet the unique needs of each customer. With Express Advantage, IBM is making a significant investment in providing Business Partners with additional skills and support and in getting the partners to better work with each other and IBM to provide a best-fit solution for the customer and a faster return on investment.

Toward this end, IBM unveiled at PartnerWorld a new service to both SMB customers and Business Partners dubbed "Express Advantage Concierge." This new no-cost customer-service telephone hotline (1-877-IBM-ACCESS) exists solely to get customers and partners quickly connected with the right people and information from IBM so that solutions to IT challenges can be easily found and problems can be quickly solved. The IBM representative who answers the phone has the sole duty of efficiently passing the caller to the people within IBM who can best answer specific technology questions (ideally, while the customer is still on the phone). The IBM Concierge is even charged to make follow-up calls to ensure that the customer and partner queries were answered to their satisfaction.

IBM has created a rich-media section of the IBM Web site that exists to better describe Express Advantage offerings to customers and articulate what's in it for them. Of course, all of this is aimed at making SMB customers happy with their IBM buying experience (via Business Partners) so they will come back and will refer their peers. Yes, this is Customer Service 101, but it has been difficult for a behemoth like IBM to coordinate and deliver this level of service to its less-than-huge customers. It remains to be seen if the new Express Advantage initiative will pull it off.

New Express Products

Of further interest to SMB customers are several new additions to IBM's Express offerings lineup that were announced at PartnerWorld:

• IBM Tivoli Identity Manager Express—A solution to help SMB companies with essential password management, user provisioning, and user access rights auditing
• IBM Tivoli Storage Manager Express—A backup solution for company data that, according to IBM, can be installed and configured in less than 30 minutes
• IBM Tivoli Monitoring Express—A solution that manages bottlenecks, performance impacts, and outages from one centralized portal
• IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager Express—A solution that manages a company's inventory of PCs and distributes software applications and security patches
• Express pSeries (System p5) offerings—New 510Q, 520Q, 560Q, and 185 Express models that can run both AIX and Linux environments, as with other pSeries servers
• IBM IntelliStation POWER 185 Express and Intellistation—Workstations that provide new levels of graphics and system performance
• IBM eServer e326 Express—A standards-based AMD64 server with dual-core processors and up to four processor cores that can run 32-bit and 64-bit applications simultaneously
• IBM Express Managed Security Services for Web Security—A managed-service offering designed to help companies better detect viruses, spyware, and other malware delivered through Web browsing to stop outbreaks before they become widespread; also designed to help businesses better enforce corporate Internet usage policies

Introducing Express Services

In a first for IBM, the company is allowing its Business Partners to be compensated for recommending IBM consulting services. For now, this applies only to three short-term consulting offerings that are designed and priced for SMB companies. The new offerings, developed by IBM business consultants and IBM Research, are designed to help companies integrate a company's business strategies and technology assets, as well as assess and address IT security and vulnerability issues. In certain cases, and with specific certifications, the partner can even be involved in the delivery of these services. These are the new Express assessment services:

• IBM Express IT Strategy Assessment—IBM consultants examine a company's existing IT processes, organization, and technology to identify gaps in performance, skills, capacity, security, and technology. A roadmap for operational improvement is provided, along with a prioritized list of recommended initiatives, including potential costs and benefits.
• IBM Express Web Effectiveness Assessment—Companies are given assistance in developing a Web presence that improves customer satisfaction, increases sales conversion rates, boosts competitive positioning and brand awareness, and leverages existing Web infrastructure.
• IBM Express Vulnerability Assessment—IBM security professionals assess the security of Web-based systems and the potential business impacts resulting from security breaches. From this information, fixes are recommended and steps are identified that can help companies comply with regulatory requirements.

SMB and SOA

Several new IBM offerings for both SMB customers and Business Partners are squarely aimed at helping all parties take advantage of the rapidly growing opportunities available via Web services and services-oriented architecture (SOA) technologies. An SOA allows for more rapid deployment of services that can measurably improve the speed in which both B2B and B2C transactions are executed, all of which directly translates to reduced costs, increased profit, and increased customer satisfaction. The SOA topic was also hot in the Solutions Center at PartnerWorld, where several vendors showed off their SOA and Web services capabilities. And SOA is showing up with frequency in updated software architectures of prominent ISVs. The recent announcement of Lawson Release 9 is a prime example.

For SMB customers, IBM has created SOA Business Central to help make implementing SOA easier by providing a comprehensive resource for discovering SOA assets, including software for SOA developed by IBM and its Business Partners. This program as well as the new SOA Specialty in PartnerWorld for Industry Networks are explained in more detail in Lee Kroon's March 20 article.

Other offerings announced at PartnerWorld help partners better articulate the benefits of SOA to SMB customers:

• SOA Business Value Analyst and Solutions Consultant Express Tools—Based on data from thousands of successful SOA installations for IBM customers, these tools allow Business Partners to work with customers to identify business problems that an SOA can solve. In addition, the tools recommend the appropriate WebSphere-based software to solve the problem, project when the customer can expect to achieve ROI on the project, and provide the architecture and implementation guidance for the project.
• Solution Starting Points (SSPs) for SOA—The experience gained from SOA by large enterprise-level accounts has been distilled down to the five key business issues customers face that an SOA can quickly address. Business Partners can use these new SSPs to develop repeatable solutions that address specific SOA-related business problems. For instance, larger enterprises moving toward an SOA have found the most success by concentrating on individual business problems, generating a return on that investment, and then moving on to tackle additional business problems.

Software as a Service (Saas)

Trumpeted at PartnerWorld and announced prior to the conference, IBM is offering new resources to help application providers develop and deploy business software to be delivered via the Web.

The SaaS model is perfectly oriented to the SMB customer as it eliminates the need for companies to buy, build, manage, and maintain applications. Readers familiar with the application service provider (ASP) model of software delivery have some idea of what SaaS is about. Companies are increasingly drawn to the SaaS model, which is well-suited to accounting, human resources, CRM, and ERP niches. IBM cited studies that estimate the market for hosted software will grow 25% a year to $10 billion by 2009, and 78% of companies surveyed across major vertical industries and company sizes are currently using or considering SaaS.

In order to encourage new and expanded SaaS offerings for SMB customers, IBM announced that it will provide ISV Business Partners with access to technical architects, free online educational courses, and new sales incentives to help them transform their applications to SaaS.

IBM also announced that reseller Business Partners will receive a 10% referral fee for submitting a lead to a SaaS application provider that results in closed business. Furthermore, IBM will provide Business Partners with access to its sales force to help close opportunities faster and gain credibility with IBM's sales experts locally.

In the past year, IBM has doubled the number of its Business Partners delivering SaaS to more than 100 partners whose solutions are sold to thousands and used by millions of users.

Are SMB Customers Really Special?

All of these new offerings and programs fit precisely into IBM's new "What Makes You Special" advertising campaign that is starting to play in various media outlets (look for lots of floating blue and orange asterisks). It goes without saying that IBM wants its Business Partners to generate more revenue, and they are doing so: Partner-generated sales increased from 33% to 35% of IBM's revenue last year. But IBM has been clear that it doesn't want partners beating the pavement just to push individual IBM hardware and software offerings. Big Blue wants its partners to add value to IBM hardware and software by helping customers find the best possible fit in terms of technology, services, consulting, support, and customer care. And IBM wants the SMB market to know that it is an approachable company that is very willing to give attention to smaller companies' special needs in much the same way that larger enterprises have enjoyed for decades. To do this, IBM is relying on its Business Partners to do the heavy lifting. So far, there is great optimism among partners and IBMers, but one can't help but hope that these and other SMB initiatives won't be buried under a mountain of blue asterisks.

Bill Rice is the senior editor of MC Showcase, the MC Press product and vendor news journal that is emailed twice weekly to over 20,000 IT professionals. Bill welcomes your comments at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..