IBM Global Services Pitches Managed Services Portfolio

The Manage it for Me portfolio of managed services, including intrusion detection, hosting and 18 others, is targeted at companies with 1,000 or fewer employees, a market segment that IBM CEO Sam Palmisano has said would be earmarked by IBM's partners.

But David Parker, director of marketing for IGS' integration technology services and strategic outsourcing business, pointed out that IBM executives have said IGS plans to pass midmarket consulting and integration leads to partners. Manage it for Me will be sold by IGS and IBM's partners alike, he said.

"A lot of [the managed services fall in the areas that are still being sold [by IGS to a range of customers," Parker said.

Still, he described most of the services in the new suite as "business-partner-enabled." The business partner, he said, will likely be the channel.

Jeremy Budd, director of SMB and channels for IGS' integrated technology services group, said Manage it for Me services are "complementary to what the partners do. I don't think you can say the same about the systems integration services.

"We recognize that in certain situations, IBM and its partners have similar capabilities," he said. IGS' intention is to have partners handle leads for systems integration services for customers with $150,000 or less in sales.

Nonetheless, IBM solution providers, which tend to view IGS as offering a complement to their own services palette but also as a competitor, wonder about its latest move into the midmarket space.

"We are concerned that our biggest partner is now wanting to compete in a space that is home to a large percent of our customer base," said Darrin Nelson, vice president of e-development at solution provider NetSetGo, Rochester, N.Y.

But Nelson said he's willing to wait and see how IBM packages these offerings. "It may be a sound business opportunity for us to resell or even extend or augment these offerings to meet the needs of our client base," he said.

Richard Vestuto, sales manager at Manchester Technologies, a Hauppauge, N.Y.-based solution provider, said IGS is cropping up more and more in the midmarket space.

IGS is "putting on a full-court press," he said, adding that Manchester, a 30-year-old, $300 million solution provider, does not partner with IBM or IGS. "They are getting really aggressive on pricing," he said.

Some integrators' anxiety stems from historical confusion about IGS' work with,or competition with,partners.

Palmisano and other top executives have acknowledged past conflict between IBM's channel and IGS, its $37 billion professional services arm. Earlier this year, Ralph Martino, vice president of strategy and marketing at IGS, said IBM would let partners take the lead on consulting and systems integration services in companies with $100 million or less in annual revenue.

Jack Egan, director of En Pointe Technologies' IBM Global Services relationship, said that Manage it for Me is a welcome addition to the El Segundo, Calif.-based company's portfolio.

"We feel that our national service offerings have been very complementary to IGS' overall business strategy," said Egan. "We continue to be excited about partnering with IBM as they venture into the midmarket space with Manage it for Me."

Some of the Manage it for Me services, such as a CRM-maintenance product, were originally created with the needs of enterprise clients in mind, IGS' Parker said. Yet as more midsize customers expressed interest in handing off the maintenance of their CRM applications to an outside party, IGS decided to create a way for partners to resell the service, Parker said.

The resale mechanism for this and other services IGS is offering is currently under development, he said.