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Strategies & Market Trends : VOLTAIRE'S PORCH-MODERATED -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Murrey Walker who wrote (42928)	10/5/2001 12:08:26 PM
From: elpolvo	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 65232

"porchspeak" = never use an adverb when the adjective is shorter?

To: Murrey Walker who wrote (42928)	10/5/2001 1:48:00 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 65232

IBM Gives Software The Hard Sell Friday October 5, 12:05 pm Eastern Time Forbes.com By Lisa DiCarlo IBM today signed its seventieth software partnership, part of a two-year-old initiative that has already added nearly $2 billion to its top line. IBM said it has partnered with Invensys , a British company that makes software for manufacturing automation. Invensys has made a commitment to sell a high percentage of its products on IBM's platform, which includes its database, servers and middleware. In return, Invensys can leverage IBM's sales force and marketing to sell its software in all corners of the world, gaining access to larger-sized customers that otherwise might have been out of the company's reach. For IBM, these partnerships are a way to steal market share from Oracle , BEA , Sun Microsystems and others. IBM has already been working with best-of-breed software companies, including SAP , Siebel and PeopleSoft --once tight partners with IBM's competitors. For example, a few years ago Siebel was a close partner of Oracle's. Only 2% to 3% of Siebel's customer relationship management software was sold on IBM's platform. Today that figure is about 35%, IBM says. "When we started the program we weren't sure if leading software vendors would be willing to make the commitments for such high market share targets," says Bob Timpson, general manager for developer relations at IBM. Several years ago, IBM actually had been in the enterprise application business, spending billions to develop and sell software. But it was an unsuccessful business, since customers preferred to buy best-of-breed software from more specialized companies. So IBM got out of the applications business and took a partner-based approach. The deals have yielded $1.75 billion in incremental revenue for IBM's database, middleware, servers and services--$1 billion of that in the first six months of this year. Timpson says IBM has also partnered with dozens of smaller niche players for less aggressive commitments. He also says there are still a few larger players that it wants to do deals with. Who'd have thought five years ago that IBM, which has forever taken a soup-to-nuts approach to technology, would succeed at being a friendly partner? This is obviously not your father's IBM.