IBM Announces Workload-Optimized Systems for Partners

ARMONK, N.Y., April 7 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced new workload-optimized systems for Business Partners to deliver to clients starting with the availability of the IBM Smart Analytics System.  This single, fine-tuned hardware and software platform is specifically designed for partners to deploy customized analytics applications to their clients for industries such as healthcare, financial markets, energy and retail.  

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IBM also announced that its lending arm, IBM Global Financing is offering up to $500 million in financing to help credit-qualified Sun Business Partners migrate towards the resale of IBM systems. These moves are all part of IBM's commitment to strengthen the IT channel coming off a major economic recession.

"These two announcements demonstrate IBM's commitment to the IT channel - providing new sources of revenue and profitability to business partners across the spectrum," said Jay Holbrook, director of WW Channels, IBM Global Financing. "IBM wants to ensure the financial health of its Business Partners so they can service and sell IT solutions to their end users clients for years to come."

The IBM Smart Analytics System is designed as a standardized offering to enable resellers and applications partners to rapidly deliver industry solutions to their clients. It delivers a single, optimized system with the right balance of software, systems and storage capabilities for workloads generating unprecedented amounts of data at extreme speeds - providing a powerful analytics platform that can be deployed and customized for clients in a matter of days.  

"This initiative clearly conveys the message that IBM is fully committed to the partner community, while also delivering systems optimized for data- intensive workloads," said Matt Castle, Managing Director, Perficient, Inc.  "Forward-thinking organizations are looking at these optimized systems coupled with analytics as the natural next step to classify, aggregate and correlate data into meaningful insights to stay ahead of competition."  

IBM Global Financing Incentives to Help Partners Ramp up Profits

IBM Global Financing is making up to $500 million in financing available to credit-qualified Sun Business Partners bringing IBM systems to their clients. IBM Global Financing's innovative and competitively-priced financing can help partners in need of working capital maintain healthy balance sheets and minimize risk – a capability Sun-Oracle's in-house financing organization does not provide. IBM's industry-leading technology and financing capabilities already have led more than 100 Sun Business Partners to either grow or establish an IBM reseller business within their firm.

IBM Global Financing also will make available its newly developed profit optimizer tool free of charge to Sun Business Partners.  Originally designed for IBM Business Partners, the new IBM-developed tool will now enable Sun Business Partners to model potential market opportunities, including revenue and profit made from selling IBM products and services and running their business with financing from IBM Global Financing. With the new profit optimizer tool, IBM and Sun Business Partners can evaluate the expected impact of their return on working capital, free cash flow and sales revenue. These are important metrics for Sun Business Partners to consider as they ponder new ways to grow their business in the aftermath of Sun's acquisition.  Partners can contact [email protected] for further information or to set up a demonstration.

IBM Workload Optimized System Leadership

IBM's leadership in workload optimized systems spans more than four decades and presents a great opportunity for partners to extend their range of offerings and add to their profits.  IBM has made significant investments in microelectronics R&D, software integration expertise and has the experience of deploying these systems to solve industry problems.   Today, IBM is working with partners by delivering a comprehensive system to bring the power of analytics and get clients up and running quickly and affordably without risk.

A powerful analytics system that would have required the time of a half a dozen or more technical experts to set up can now be deployed by as few as one, or none at all for small configurations.  IBM is now bringing together software, hardware and industry solution partners to help clients in different industries be "analytics ready" in as few as 12 days.  Financing, webinars and training workshops for partners will help support the acceleration of this initiative.

Partners are seeing the value IBM brings as integration is key.  IBM provides the industry insight through services to test and tune the system to the client's exact specifications, works with partners to ensure their applications are optimized and offers financing to ensure the systems match clients' budgets.

"While other vendors are taking a different approach, IBM is actively engaged in growing its community of channel partners," said Rob Thomas, vice president, IBM Business Development. "We are catering to software, hardware and industry solution partners who are an important part of our IBM team. IBM reinforces its commitment to our partners by bringing the power of analytics to clients to allow them to transform their business through information."  

"The exponential growth in both the volume and complexity of data is creating unique challenges and opportunities for our customers.  Forsythe is uniquely positioned to help our clients not only protect and manage their growing data, but extract greater business value from it," said Joe Rueda, Vice President for IBM Solutions, Forsythe.  "We believe our expertise and history of helping clients realize the business value of IT, combined with the integrated IBM Smart Analytics System, will quickly help our clients begin exploiting the power within their data."

In addition to the IBM Smart Analytics System, IBM's portfolio of optimized systems that have been tested and proven in industry scenarios include the following: WebSphere DataPower Appliances, WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance, Tivoli Foundation Appliances, ISS Proventia Server Intrusion Prevention System, Informix BladeCenter Cluster, Cognos Now!, and Lotus Foundations.

IBM will announce details of the Business Partner reseller initiative for the Smart Analytics System in the second quarter of 2010.  For more information on the IBM Smart Analytics System, please visit: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/infosphere/smart-analytics-system/launch.html

IBM Global Financing is the largest IT financier in the marketplace today and has many specialized offerings for the business partner community. It operates in over 55 countries and has a customer base of over 125,000 clients and business partners.  Sun-Oracle Partners can contact IBM Global Financing by visiting http://www.ibm.com/financing.

SOURCE IBM