IBM is tailoring its blade server marketing strategy to
address vertical and niche markets, including small
businesses.
The company claims to be the number one blade server supplier
ahead of HP, Sun Microsystems and Dell. Up to now, most blades sold
have gone into chassis systems located at large companies’ central
datacentres.
Doug Balog, vice-president and business line executive for IBM
BladeCenter products, said the company would be increasing its
efforts in targeting the products at small companies and larger
companies’ distributed computing environments.
IBM developed the BladeCenter platform in partnership with
Intel, which is expected to soon launch its quad-core processor
line, codenamed Clovertown. AMD plans to launch its own quad-core
processors around the middle of next year. IBM is also expected to
ship blades equipped with these processors when they are ready.
Analyst IDC says the blade server market is currently worth
around £1.6bn, and will be worth around £5.2bn by 2010. IBM has so
far sold around 500,000 blades fitted in about 50,000 of its blade
chassis boxes since entering the market in 2002.
IDC says IBM has installed 22% more blades than HP, and IBM now
says that blade sales currently represent around 25% of its
x86-based sales per year.