Comments on: IBM SMB Analyst Summit Day 1: “IBM is great! …but it’s not for me”

By: Cote'

Cote' — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 07:07:29 +0000

Bill: the answer is a qualified yes: IBM has non-enterprise service teams. For the most part, however, their mid-market or done through partners.
Anne: successfully going down market…though it’s by acquisition, how about Cisco and Linksys? You’re question is right though, it’s a tough example to fine. Of course, IBM in the PC market until the clones took over.
Tom: I’m glad you liked it, and thanks for the comment. It was nice meeting in person. And, I think you’re right. As many discusions at the event and during 1:1 went, there’s plenty in the IBM catalog, it’s just figuring out how to package it up correctly and get that packaged item in front of the right people. I look forward to the IBM coffee grider 2.0 ;)

By: Tom Curran

Tom Curran — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 06:07:02 +0000

wow, lots of good analysis here. Although I am an old IBM guy, even I don’t remember when IBM sold coffee grinders and butcher’s scales.
But I do remember IBM’s being very strong in SMB - the image of IBM’s being only large enterprises is only about 10-15 years old in a 100 year old company. So I think we can
fix that with time and marketing.
Interesting also that you commented about hosted applications and environments as an option for IBM SMB - you refer to Hoplon which Redmonk now knows well and it’s a very small company - only 40 employees and hosting works well for them

By: Anne

Anne — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 17:43:04 +0000

“can that theory of software value support the size of companies like IBM, Microsoft, Adobe, and other companies that were born in the closed source, licensed software world?”

I suspect the answer to that is largely no, although it doesn’t mean that big software companies are going to die out, just that they don’t have a good way to get into the SMB market. I have been trying to think of a case of a software company successfully going down-market. Can you think of one?

Pushing their software through partners is reasonable even from an Agilist/decentralist approach–yes it involves mediation, but it’s also a kind of decentralizing action, pushing power and capability and profit out to smaller and more dispersed nodes. Your suggestion of rebranding IBM stuff entirely is a way of pushing power and meaning outwards and away from the center, are there other ways to do that? What about letting the partner ecosystem add new features? Not a complete open sourcing approach, but opening up the source to partners.

By: Bill de hOra

Bill de hOra — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 11:14:05 +0000

I wonder if people in the SMB/E space worry about an invasion of the killer service teams. Do IGS have non-enterprise servcies teams? If not, maybe they could buy/partner with the likes of Thoughtworks.