IBM Offers Bevy Of Products, Programs For ISVs

At its PartnerWorld conference in Las Vegas Tuesday, IBM unveiled a cavalcade of programs, products and projects aimed at ISVs that target midsize businesses (fewer than 1,000 employees) in specific industries. Big Blue described the ISV push as a "sweeping realignment" of programs to recruit ISVs, ease their development efforts, and improve joint sales and marketing efforts.

The top initiative, PartnerWorld Industry Networks for ISVs (PWIN), opens the door for thousands of midmarket ISVs to partner with IBM, revamps how ISVs participate in IBM's development and marketing programs, and adds new partner programs and benefits (see story). Up to now, IBM had two tiers of ISVs: Global Strategic Alliances partners, such as Siebel Systems and SAP AG, and ISV Advantage partners, a select 200 or so SMB vendors chosen by IBM as industry-segment leaders that have committed extensively to IBM. But with PWIN, the Armonk, N.Y., company adds two more tiers: PartnerWorld for Developers and PartnerWorld Industry Networks, which make room for thousands of ISVs.

PWIN for ISVs is organized by industry, initially for telecommunications, financial services, banking, health care and life sciences, and retail. ISVs that want to participate first log on to IBM's PartnerWorld Web site (www.IBM.com/ISV) and click on the verticals they serve. They then can see industry-specific "Business Insights" that detail market trends and areas of IT spending, view enablement blueprints that show which IBM software components can be used for specific apps, network with other ISVs, and locate IBM marketing and sales programs.

Besides showing ISVs which components can go into, for example, a clinical genomics system, IBM's enablement blueprints also provide a road map that shows an ISV how to move up the PartnerWorld food chain. For instance, all ISVs participating in the lower PartnerWorld for Developers rung must agree to include at least one IBM package--such as WebSphere Application Server or DB2 Universal Database--in their solutions. Becoming a PartnerWorld Industry Networks partner requires using three IBM components. And the higher the ISVs climb, the more they can tap into marketing campaigns and other promotions, said Scott Hebner, IBM's vice president of marketing and strategy for ISV and developer relations.

"The criteria for each stage is published on the Web site," Hebner said. "This is not about IBM telling ISVs what to do. It's how we are helping them serve [industry-specific] customers." IBM plans to add more vertical industries, including government, to the program in the second quarter, Hebner said.

IBM also is adding five new products it hopes will attract ISVs. Migration Station, delivered through IBM's developerWorks Web site, offers the documentation, toolkits, implementation road maps, tutorials and Webcasts that current Microsoft ISVs need to migrate to the IBM universe. The new Orchestration and Provisioning Automation Library (OPAL) toolkit helps ISVs define policies that customers use when dedicating capacity and other IT resources to the application.

"That means customers can better orchestrate how all applications make best use of their IT infrastructure," Hebner said. "Most customers have 20 percent capacity usage." OPAL comprises a library of service management workflows that show how different applications fit with each other, Hebner said, adding that 40 ISVs, including Citrix, have signed up to use OPAL.

"I think it will help justify projects," said Mark Durst, president of Maximizer Enterprise for Notes, an IBM ISV Advantage partner based in Markham, Ontario. "ISVs can sell their applications as a lower total-cost-of-ownership because it can be provisioned against the entire infrastructure."

IBM's new Business Performance Management toolkit provides a framework for combining Tivoli, WebSphere and DB2 software for building dashboards that show IT bottlenecks as they occur, as well as the impact of those bottlenecks on business objects. Similar to products from Mercury Interactive, such dashboards could reveal how an often-clogged Web server blocks a company's top customer from accessing inventory information. Hebner said 30 ISVs are enabling their applications with the new framework.

Another new offering, Integrated Runtime for ISVs, is designed to simplify and speed application building. The product comprises IBM's WebSphere Application Server Express and DB2 UDB Express--versions of IBM's software stack that were previously rewritten for the SMB market. Mark Ouelette, vice president of sales and marketing at IBM Software Group, said IBM plans to add the user interface framework of Portal Express.

The fifth product, Solution Builder Express, is aimed at resellers building more customized applications and provides a development environment composed of different Express products that have been "pre-combined" by solution area and industry. These "Solution Starting Points," as IBM calls them, address the same initial industries as PWIN.

"This is a fundamental transformation from how we do things today," Hebner said.