SAN Arrays: IBM

When it comes to the tricky area of managing channel conflict, IBM has definitely found the formula.

A heated competition between IBM and Hewlett-Packard in the Channel Champions SAN array category turned in IBM’s favor in channel-program satisfaction criteria, which IBM swept across the board.

In particular, IBM pulled 7.7 points ahead of HP in the area of reducing channel conflict and 5.6 points ahead in sales margins.

Solution providers said IBM has been making strong progress in ensuring that deserving partners get the special pricing and win the deals.

“You can see the difference in the last year,” said Hunt Russell, director of business development for Evolving Solutions, an IBM storage partner in Hamel, Minn. He said as long as partners have a good CRM system that enables them to document their work with a customer, IBM protects them against interlopers.

For similar reasons, partners were also not surprised by IBM’s high marks for sales margins. IBM has not only gotten faster at delivering back-end rebates, but has also enriched special bid pricing and developed incentives around bundled solutions, said Bob Hankins, director of IBM storage products for Logicalis, Bloomfield Hills, Mich. “A lot of that margin was moved up front to the transaction level,” he said.

In technical areas, the tables were turned. IBM came in second to HP across the board. IBM’s weakest showing was in price/performance, where it trailed HP by 4.5 points. Denise Buonaiuto, vice president of global business partner sales for IBM’s Systems and Technology Group, attributed that result to IBM’s product transition during the survey period from its ESS800 server to the new enterprise-class DS8000 storage system line and its introduction of a new midrange DS6000 series.

“The new products have better price/performance but weren’t available, and our competitors made some enhancements in there,” she said. Hankins agreed, saying IBM’s new products have reset the bar. “From a price/performance standpoint, they’ve really done a nice job,” he said. “They made some significant strides.”

IBM’s recent addition of NetApp’s iSCSI IP SAN product to its line could also help improve its price/performance rating and bolster its SMB offering, solution providers said.

Overall, IBM’s composite rating of 78.9 put it just ahead of runner-up HP (78.2) and a fair distance ahead of Sun Microsystems (73.9), EMC (72.3), Hitachi Data Systems (70.4), Dell (70.4) and StorageTek (69.8).