July 17, 2006

IBM's Express Service - Just Perfect for Small Businesses

Creating software for small businesses is not hard to do. Creating online applications is also not that hard to do. However, what is hard to do is to create an ecosystem of online software that resellers will find easy to sell to small businesses.

Local resellers are VITAL to reaching small businesses and IBM knows this so it is doing all it can to ensure its resellers can sell more, easier to small businesses such as Express Managed Services.

Express Managed Services is a suite of online (on demand) hosted applications which have fixed cost and scope reports Laurie McCabe, Vice President, SMB Insights & Solutions, AMI Partners.

Although IBM's Global Services (it's technology consulting and service line) has only 6% of its sales to small businesses, in June, writes McCabe, IGS announced new
plans to build on this foundation with enhanced managed services initiatives and offerings designed to help IBM drive its share growth in the SMB service market.

Express services include - Desktop management, Email recovery, email security, managed security services for web security and online backup.

McAbe's analysis writes Over the past few years, IGS has consistently emphasized that it intends to partner, not compete with, local SMB service partners, providing clear rules of engagement and business terms for these partners. However, despite this outreach-and the fact that it would be difficult to impossible for IBM to profitably sell most services directly to SMBs-building channel trust among
services partners has been challenging for IBM. IGS's new channel incentives and streamlined partnering programs, coupled with tailored SMB services, should help IBM to surmount this hurdle and build the local presence it needs to effectively
reach and support the large, dispersed SMB customer base.

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