Integration Push Fuels IBM's Software Group

"We're still hiring," said Steve Mills, senior vice president at IBM and head of the software group. The $13 billion division this year added more than 3,000 employees, bringing the current total to 37,000, he said.

That staff increase isn't coincidental. To maintain double-digit growth in IBM's middleware business, Mills and other company executives met with reporters and industry analysts here last week to unveil a broad integration strategy aimed at tying disparate networks together with IBM software.

The plan calls for IBM to group its four main middleware lines,WebSphere, Tivoli, Lotus and DB2,under an integration-focused marketing umbrella, said Lou D'Ambrosio, vice president of worldwide sales and marketing for the IBM Software Group. Integration is key to IBM's overall software strategy, he said, citing a recent IBM survey showing that only 5 percent of the company's 20,000 software customers worldwide consider themselves to beat an "advanced stage" in their e-business buildouts.

IBM sees a strong growth opportunity and last week launched IBM CrossWorlds Extender for WebSphere Commerce, a tool aimed at helping solution providers and customers integrate WebSphere with back-end applications, D'Ambrosio said.

The integration focus will fuel the momentum that IBM's software unit already has generated, said Constantine Photopoulos, president of Eden Communications, an IBM solution provider in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. "CrossWorlds is a great addition. That's really all you need to offer,cross-platform integration," he said.

But IBM's move to cluster its core middleware lines under one roof might miss the boat, Photopoulos said. "All of those things are separate products," he said, adding that it appears IBM is trying to "cobble them together and make it seem like something [bigger."