But price cuts on soon-to-be-replaced hardware can only do so much to keep the iSeries channel booking sales. And that is why IBM today will announce a set of so-called Express bundles that will make it easier for IBM’s sales reps and channel partners to sell existing and future iSeries machines.
While today’s announcements will focus on the iSeries, according to Joanne Duguid, vice president of eServer SMB marketing at IBM, the company has some 45 Express bundles of hardware, software, and services across all of its product lines and will in the next several weeks roll out another 15 bundles on various eServer products.
To become an Express solution, a product has to be installable in five mouse clicks or less, be modular and scalable, and has to be saleable by partners. A big portion of iSeries and pSeries server sales (in the range of 80%), and an increasing portion of xSeries sales, come through the IBM channel. The Express bundles lower the price for customers who buy a solution (rather than a piece of hardware) with discounts off the price of components bought separately and increases margins for business partners, who can easily configure and sell the solution rather than chase box sales.
Even at relatively small companies, the iSeries and its predecessor, the AS/400, is generally the main bean-counting and data processing engine for the company, and that is why high availability clustering has been a traditional focus for the OS/400 platform for nearly a decade and a half. One of the more interesting Express bundles being announced today is called the High Availability Express Solution on iSeries, which is comprised of an existing iSeries Model 810 server (which uses IBM’s 64-bit S-Star PowerPC processor), OS/400 software, plus high availability software from IBM’s six core HA software partners (DataMirror, iTera, Lakeview Technology, Maximum Availability, Trader’s, and Vision Solutions). The bundle includes a year’s worth of maintenance and 24×7 tech support. The base HA Express bundle will cost $51,000, and through IBM’s Global Financing arm midrange customers can lease the bundle over 36 months for as little as $1,935 per month. This is well within the budgetary possibilities for even the most penny-pinching of OS/400 shops.
The iSeries Infrastructure Management Express bundle takes an iSeries Model 800 running OS/400 Standard Edition or Advanced Edition and bundles in Integrated xSeries Server (IxS) co-processors running Windows 2000 or Windows 2003. This Express bundle includes server consolidation and migration planning services (provided by IBM or its partners), plus prepaid tech support and maintenance. Customers that opt for Linux on iSeries partitions get a standard Linux support contract from Red Hat or SuSE thrown in and one day of Linux implementation services. The whole shebang comes with a $30,000 list price on the base Model 800 Standard Edition box, and with 36-month financing, customers can pick up a new iSeries box and install Windows and Linux apps on it for as little as $775 per month, says Duguid. IBM will even take away an aging AS/400 server to the recycler for free.
IBM is also announcing something called Network Operations and Management Services, an Express services deal that has IBM technicians monitor your network on a 24×7 basis, tracking problems as they arise and updating software with patches as necessary. IBM provides customers with monthly network status reports as well as an online portal that lets them see the status of their network in real-time. The Infrastructure Recovery Services offering is a related Express bundle and is a first-step in helping midrange shops create disaster recovery plans. The service includes a two-day workshop for recovery planning and provides a pre-configured iSeries or pSeries server that IBM will ship to the customer in the event of a disaster. Pricing on these last two Express bundles was not available as we went to press.
This article is based on material originally published by ComputerWire
