IBM Opens Up BladeCenter Spec

IBM says the release of the spec has two purposes. On the peripherals front, it's intended to encourage third-parties to develop networking switches and adapter cards that fit into BladeCenter systems, thus broadening the "ecosystem" for the platform.

On the systems side, IBM hopes to spur the creation of function-specific appliances based on BladeCenter. These would fall into the burgeoning category of network-edge systems, such as hardware firewalls, intrusion-detection devices and XML accelerators.

"We're not encouraging people to build [general-purpose] blades that already exist," explains Tim Dougherty, IBM's eServer BladeCenter marketing director "What we're looking for is things that we don't already have. VARs should look at this as what will hopefully become a dramatic expansion of solutions for blades."

IBM has already used its considerable internal resources to get major vendors, such as Cisco and Nortel, to design products that connect into the BladeCenter universe. But opening up the spec will ease the entry path for smaller solution providers, who wouldn't otherwise appear on IBM's radar screen.

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"I read it as a desire to expand the customer base and the number of people who adopt blades," says John Humphreys, research manager at IDC. "They're trying to have as broad an ecosystem as standalone servers have."

IBM may also be looking to drive up even further the hefty 43.8 percent of the blade market it holds, according to second quarter 2004 revenue figures just released by IDC. Hewlett-Packard holds the second slot, with 31.9 percent of the blade market; Dell is third with a 3.3 percent share. Overall industrywide blade revenue for the second quarter was $233 million, according to IDC.

In addition to offering a free spec, Big Blue is looking to sell support and product-customization services to interested parties via IBM's Engineering and Technology Services organization.

Product logoing wasn't addressed in the IBM announcement. "We may choose to logo some [products] depending on the business situation, but we're not going to logo them all," Dougherty says.