By Paul Kunert
9 October 2008
IBM has unveiled enterprise data centre specialisations for a select band of resellers interested in addressing the growing need among large firms to radically overhaul their inefficient server farms.
According to research by IBM, the majority of Global 1000 organisations will need to significantly modify their data centre in the next five years to address power, space, cooling and management issues.
The new enterprise data centre speciality programme (NEDC) launched today includes three areas where partners can specialise; consolidation and virtualisation, energy efficiency and business resilience.
“We have come from an environment where people were less worried about inefficiencies in the data centre, “said Mike Bernard, IBM general business and marketing, but this was before energy prices started to rise he added.
Partners must have accreditations across IBM hardware, software and services to be able to address the major issues in the data centre he said.
“There will be a relatively small number of partners that are going to be sophisticated enough to handle the requirements of the programme and more importantly the requirements of clients,” said
The scheme will have two tiers with top level Speciality Elite members getting $100,000 business development funds upfront from IBM to invest marketing, staff and demo facilities, first tier partners will get $25,000.
Other benefits include access to IBM Lab services, assessment tools and sales support resources.
