IBM Drives Express Strategy Across Company

The new strategy leverages work previously done by the company's multi-billion software division, which has scaled down sophisticated offerings developed for large, institutional users, and repackaged them as "Express" solutions. The company has developed Express software products around its WebSphere, DB2, Portal products, for example. Today in New York, the company unveiled an additional software Express application, WebSphere Commerce Express, plus new hardware, service and finance offerings that will also be sold and marketed as Express solutions.

Insiders at the company say this represents the first time in recent history that IBM has worked so cooperatively across its sprawling and sometimes bureaucratic empire to develop specific solutions for a targeted set if customers that rely on contributions from multiple divisions within the company. The man behind the initiative inside IBM as well as today's announcements, Marc Lautenbach, general manager of IBM's Global Small and Medium Business group, says the new portfolio of products will go a long way in helping IBM gain share in a market with great potential but one that it does not dominate or even lead.

"The key thing to remember is this: we are very serious about increasing our market share in this market and that every point of share is worth approximately $1 billion," says Launtenbach.

Throughout IBM's presentation Wednesday, the company time and again insisted that although many of the new products unveiled today will be offered directly by IBM via its Web sites and other routes to market, the key to its increasing its market share in the midsize business market is its business partners. Partners not only represent IBM in accounts that Big Blue does not have the resources to cover, they also serve as the outsourced IT departments for many medium enterprises the world over, Lautenbach says.

Specifically, IBM unveiled today 13 new hardware products including new Express versions of IBM's ThinkPad line of portable PCs, plus new Express ThinkCentre desktop machines. Frank Vitagliano, vice president of channels marketing inside IBM's PC division, characterizes the new products as aggressively priced machines for customers who do not need all the bells and whistles that some enterprise customers do. He concedes that customers of all sizes will likely buy the machines as they see fit, but that IBM won't upend its PC business with these new, low cost devices. The number of products in the PCD Express portfolio will be somewhat limited and won't have traditional price protection, he adds.

In addition to the new hardware products and the aforementioned WebSphere Commerce Express product, IBM also unveiled today WebSphere MQ Platform Express for Employee Workplace, a new Linux-based server portal solution that combines an IBM's eSeries 255 server with WebSphere Portal Express. The Linux-based solution is expected to be available from IBM and partners beginning in September.