IBM Gets Serious About Express

But just how much traction? Many business partners are quick to laud the opportunity Express hands them to burst into new markets, but at the same time acknowledge that IBM has some kinks to iron out around licensing, marketing and product interoperability.

"[Express] is proof that IBM is serious about the SMB market," says Wayne Scarano, president of SGA Business Systems, an IBM-Lotus partner in Hillsboro, N.J., who raves about the cut-rate pricing for Lotus Domino Express. "But IBM doesn't advertise it enough. They expect us business partners to get the word out%85I think it's a great program, but that's the biggest challenge."

And advertising is what Microsoft, the incumbent technology leader in the SMB space, does best. Scarano would like to see IBM make a bigger deal about Express, buttressing the work that partners are already doing in the field. He might get his wish. As 2004 gets rolling, IBM is hoping to loosen the Redmond stranglehold and keep a step ahead of rivals like BEA Systems by expanding the Express line into some of its Tivoli products, as well as tailoring specific vertical solutions such as the recent WebSphere Business Connect Express for UCCNET, according to Mark Ouellette, vice president of SMB at IBM. Meanwhile, it is drafting even more regional partners and ISVs into the fold, aggressively tapping them to build custom Express solutions or to port applications onto the platform. The partner push is no joke; IBM regularly states that 90 percent of its Express-related sales will go through solution providers. And so far, 900 partners have signed on to such IBM programs as Express Enablement and Value Advantage Plus.

Sam Fatigato, CEO of Ascendant Technologies, is one such partner. Ascendant Technologies, based in Austin, Texas, is experiencing a boost from Express deployments, which now comprise 25 percent of its business. So far, the firm has deployed solutions based on several of the products, including DB2 Express, WebSphere Application Server Express and Portal Express Server, and it plans to explore newer offerings around Lotus Domino this year. Perhaps most remarkably, in 50 percent of its Express projects the IBM platform is replacing an existing Microsoft implementation, Fatigato says, with many of those customers also choosing to run Linux as the operating system.

"Express has allowed us to open up to those markets that in the past really weren't interested in IBM from a cost and support standpoint," he says.

But Fatigato is not without complaints. In fact, he is fairly typical of some IBM business partners who jumped aboard Big Blue's Express train: They laud the fact that the technology is not dumbed-down, is easy to install and gives them an expanded market opportunity. But they still question everything from IBM's licensing strategy to decisions the company has made around product interoperability.

In Fatigato's case, the issue is shared-user licensing. Specifically, he asserts that IBM lacks a flexible and palatable Express pricing option for companies whose workers don't typically work at individual desktops, such as in a medical practice where 20 to 30 nurses might share one medical check-in system running a Portal Server Express solution. IBM's structure for licensing Portal Server Express--selling blocks of 20 concurrent users--does not suit this type of customer environment, he says.

For the most part, however, partners herald IBM's Express pricing. To get an idea why, consider the enterprise version of WebSphere Application Server, which is priced starting at $10,000 per CPU. The Express variation of the product, while limited to companies with between 100 and 1,000 employees and lacking high-end functionality such as Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) features, costs just $2,000 per CPU and includes support services.

"This opens up a whole new world and customer base," says Bryan Cafaro, CEO at Tri-Bry Information Technology Solutions, Hoboken, N.J. "These types of customers might have $10,000 to spend. Now they can spend $2,000%85and have $8,000 left over for other stuff."

Tri-Bry specializes in systems integration, including expertise with mainframes and IBM's legacy iSeries systems. The challenge for its iSeries customers has been finding a way to affordably unlock their valuable legacy data and serve it to other systems and the Web. Until the Express versions of WebSphere Application Server and Portal Server came along, the option was IBM's enterprise products, and they were much too costly, Cafaro says.

IBM only recently began offering Portal Server Express on the iSeries, a blunder in Cafaro's estimation. He says he eagerly moved his iSeries customers over to WebSphere Application Server Express 5.0 nearly a year ago, only to find that the portal version of the product didn't run on the hardware. Thus, he had given his customers a way to pull legacy business logic and data out of the iSeries but no affordable front-end platform to display and distribute it to users. "All I can say is it's about time," he says.

At the one-year mark for Express, it's clear, however, that IBM has done a number of things right. It has adhered strictly to the criteria that products must meet to earn the Express tag, including mandated price ranges, easy administration and a smaller footprint. Partners have also raved about IBM taking the pain out of installation. For DB2 Express, for example, two disks and a few clicks are all that are required.

Developers have latched onto the Express platform as well. The Express version of DB2 in particular strips away a lot of technical development roadblocks as well as pricing impediments, according to Stephen O'Grady, senior analyst at RedMonk, Bath, Maine.

Nonetheless, given Big Blue's roots, questions will remain as to whether Express can truly compete long-term for the attention of SMB companies, whose needs vary starkly from their enterprise brethren. The key will be for IBM to stick to its guns around simplicity and attractive pricing. Consistency could, in the end, enable Big Blue to give Microsoft a run for its money, O'Grady says.

"It's really too early to say if IBM is stealing share in this space, but it has definitely attracted mind share," O'Grady says. "And from the standpoint of getting a broad catalog of products to market that goes beyond being a stripped-down version of their enterprise products, it has done well."