PartnerWorld 2002

On the server side, IBM's message is that entry level is good. The company plans to unveil the z800 mainframe family at PartnerWorld. Available in eight models, the entry-level units can be bundled with IBM's Parallel Sysplex clustering technology, which ties them to z900 mainframes for business continuity and other purposes, said Rich Lechner, vice president of sales and marketing for IBM's zSeries. He expects up to 75 percent of z800 sales to go through solution providers.

The one-way to four-way z800s support all of IBM's mainframe operating systems, including the new low-cost z/OS-e, designed for e-business applications. The z800s are slated to begin shipping late next month, with hardware, software and maintenance costing about $350,000 over a three-year lease, Lechner said.

IBM this week also plans to offer mainframes bundled with the Shark Enterprise Storage Server hard-drive array and/or the TotalStorage Virtual Tape Server. In addition, the company said it will allow solution providers to offer IBM Global Financing's Technology Upgrade Option, which lets mainframes be upgraded midlease.

IBM's new mainframes will help customers running VM and VSE environments add a new server when needed, said Joe Wurtz, vice president of eServers at MSI Systems Integrators, an Omaha, Neb.-based solution provider. "They can keep on adding new hardware so their environments don't stagnate," he said.

Besides unveiling the z800 family, IBM is slated to showcase its new entry-level p610 6C1 rack-mount and 6E1 tower servers. The units feature 333MHz Power3-II processors, which use 57 percent less energy and produce 63 percent less heat than comparable Sun Microsystems 280R servers, said Chuck Bryan, director of pSeries product marketing at IBM.

Big Blue also enhanced its entire p610 family with integrated RAID 5 support, Bryan said. Prices for the new servers start at $5,995 for a one-way configuration. Two-way versions also are available.

MSI's Wurtz sees two sides to IBM's new entry-level servers. "It's priced very aggressively to move in the low end against Sun and HP, so we will need to sell a lot to make up the revenue," he said. "But customers need the servers."

In storage, IBM plans to introduce its TotalStorage Proven program, which identifies pretested, interoperable solutions. Kathleen Smith, vice president of storage solutions for IBM's Storage Systems Group, said partners will be able to use the solutions to speed the sales cycle and integration. IBM also plans to open its TotalStorage Solution Centers for testing custom storage solutions.

Web services highlight IBM's software news at PartnerWorld, where the company is expected to unveil details of its Web Services on WebSphere program. The initiative is designed to help solution providers develop Web services for areas such as financial services, health care and telecommunications. Partners will receive marketing support and technology to help build and deploy Web services.

IBM this week also is slated to announce major enhancements to its Linux channel program, including improved demand-generation and marketing support to lure more solution providers to the Linux platform. The number of business partners supporting IBM's Linux-enabled software rose more than 800 percent over the past year, and more than 4,700 partners now support IBM middleware running on Linux, company executives said.

IBM Global Services is expected to unveil a partnership with Indigo Stone, a U.K.-based company that offers technology to reduce system recovery time in a disaster from an average of 29 hours to about 20 minutes. The organization also is working with Symantec to deploy the security vendor's Intruder Alert intrusion-detection software to help secure the e-business infrastructure for IBM's Managed Security Services.

PAULA ROONEY and ELIZABETH MONTALBANO contributed to this story.