IBM will offer incentives for partners to resell
e-business hosting services to help its hardware resellers to
expand beyond the selling of systems.
"Over the past year or so we've been working on a strategy to
enable traditional hardware resellers to sell this new range of
hosted solutions," said Dev Mukherjee, vice president of marketing
and strategy for e-business on demand at IBM's Global Services
unit.
So far, IBM has sold the bulk of its e-business hosting services
through its internal sales force, but both IBM and its partners are
interested in increasing the reseller participation, he said.
"Partners have been saying they would like to get into this
because, like IBM, they see this is the direction the market is
going," he said. Reselling these services gives the partners a
chance to append their own complementary services to the IBM
offerings.
Mukherjee declined to say what percentage of sales revenue IBM
expected its channel partners to generate eventually, compared with
IBM's internal sales staff.
"What I can say is that we have seen a huge amount of interest
from resellers, and we believe this package will make it easy for
them to resell these services," he said.
Asked to give a ballpark figure of how many partners IBM expects
will be interested in and able to resell these services, Mukherjee
said the programme has been designed to appeal "to as broad a range
of hardware resellers as possible".
IBM will provide training and incentives to its partners
interested in reselling e-business hosting services, such as
security, computing capacity on demand and application services.
Incentives include an increase in commissions and signing
bonuses.
IBM is particularly interested in seeing its partners reselling
into the small-and-medium sized business market, which IBM broadly
defines as companies with up to 1,000 employees, Mukherjee
said.
To this end, IBM is rolling out a new managed hosting services
offering tailored for SMEs. Called "Managed Hosting, Infrastructure
Solutions With Server Management, Entry", the programme is
modelled on those offered to large companies, including shared and
virtualised network infrastructure, and optional multilayer
firewall and load balancing features, but with a scope and price
that are tailored for SMEs.
IBM is also launching two new hosting services for SMEs based on
its iSeries server platform.
Despite the focus on the SME market, the sales incentives apply
to all types of partner sales, including those made to large
companies. IBM will launch this first in the US, and plans to
extend it to Europe and Asia-Pacific later on at a yet unspecified
date.
The availability of the different offerings for partner
resellers varies, but all will be available between now and the end
of the second quarter.
Juan Carlos Perez writes for IDG News Service