IBM launching a platform for SMB opportunity

The vendor sees its Blue Business Platform as the way to help solution providers and ISVs drive new applications into the SMB space
5/2/2008 9:59:00 AM By: Jeff Jedras

Los Angeles – Telling partners at its annual Partner Leadership Forum that an ecosystem approach is needed to harness the $500 billion SMB opportunity, IBM (NASDAQ:
IBM) made a number of announcements Thursday focused on building that SMB ecosystem and helping partners sell into the space.

“We strongly believe this needs a team approach that's why we're announcing it at partner world,” said Erich Clementi, general manager of the business systems division in the IBM systems and technology group. The vision is for a Web 2.0 marketplace, dubbed Global Application Marketplace, where clients, and partners, shop for and find systems solutions from IBM and from other partners, deploy them in an integrated computing environment, and manage them easily and intuitively once deployed.

The umbrella for the initiative is the Blue Business Platform and a key part of the platform will be the Application Integration Toolkit, a set of open standard interfaces to facilitate easier and more consistent instillation of new applications, systems management and online services. Clementi likens it to SOA for the mid-market.

“This is a very open approach and we invite our business partners to join us,” said Clementi. “It's a tremendous opportunity, you're virtually in global reach.”

IBM's first product offering to come out of the Blue Business Platform is IBM Lotus Foundations, an appliance delivered as an on-premise software server. Aimed at businesses of 500 seats or less and delivered primarily through the channel, the solution is designed to deploy out of the box in less than 30 minutes. It runs on Linux and encompasses everything an SMB would need from an IT perspective, including e-mail and collaboration with Lotus Notes and Domino, file management, directory services, back-up and recovery, firewall, anti-virus, anti-spam and the Lotus Symphony office suite.

“We've completely masked all the administration complexity usually associated with these systems so its transparent to the SMB,” said Sean Poulley, vice-president of online collaboration services on the IBM software group. “What we've also done is completely masked Linux from the end user, and if you don't think that's possible you've never used TiVo.”

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