28 January 2008
IBM has raised its ambitions in the SME software arena after taking the wraps off several initatives to seize a slice of the Software as a Service (SaaS) market.
The vendor has been banging the drum at its Lotusphere event where it made several announcements, including a partnership to deliver a product co-developed with SAP.
IBM talked up the need for collaboration tools and encouraging users to move to a Web 2.0 world, calling on business partners to deliver its SME Lotus Foundations servers that could be used to tap into web-based services.
In a statement, Mike Phodin, general manager of IBM Lotus Software, said the SME market offered a sizeable target and growth for the vendor.
"Our SME approach… combines easy-to-deploy, self-managed on premise servers with web delivered, extranet collaboration services," he said.
Clive Longbottom, service director at Quocirca, said IBM had made overtures to the SME market in the past but suffered from the absence of an established channel to serve that market.
"It has a platform that can be built on but it has got to work out how to build the correct channel and convince customers that IBM is not too big to work with," he said.
David Hurley, managing director of Anglia Business Solutions, said IBM would struggle to break the market share held by rivals, particularly Microsoft.
"It does not have a channel and people will be very reluctant to change when they are using systems that are being built on all the time. Why change just for the sake of IBM?" he said.
Meanwhile, Big Blue has also signalled a commitment to increase the number of opporunities for partners promoting its Sametime unified communications technology, signing deals with a number of vendors, including Cisco and Nortel.
