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To: stockman_scott who wrote (47536)	10/5/2001 2:16:59 PM
From: RobertHChaney	Respond to of 54805

Scott, I was just about to post the same interesting article link, when I saw you beat me to the draw. IBM Gives Software The Hard Sell 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. 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. I thought this article provided excellent proof of what I had read elsewhere, that ORCL's incursions into enterprise apps have created huge channel conflicts that are hurting its DB sales. Whereas IBM has avoided this by fate by withdrawing from enterprise apps and thereby gaining DB support from major players in that game. However, I wonder if the reverse will be true for IBM in middleware, because of their serious channel conflict caused by their large server hardware business. Whereas, BEAS should enjoy the advantage of not being burdened with this potentially large problem. We can already see coming implications as INTC and DELL line up on the BEAS side of the battle. Maybe HP/CPQ and SUNW will eventually join for the same reasons. Also, as Paul Philp has accurately pointed out, IBM's massive service integration business should cause competitors therein to side with BEAS, due to the same fundamental issues. This is obviously not your father's IBM. True, that's now called Microsoft!!! Regards, Robert