Summary
After six months and some 300 customer engagements, trying out a new sales and services approach that concentrates on industry-specific solution sets, IBM has decided to realign its global Linux-related sales and marketing teams around a new model.
Original source:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1850734,00.asp
Details
The shift recognizes the growing demand from IBM customers that the company transform enterprise operations to become more responsive, "real time" and on demand, Scott Handy, the vice president for worldwide Linux at IBM in Somers, N.Y., told eWEEK.
IBM has aligned each solution with a services-led delivery capability, with specific business insight and solution customization by industry.
This solution-delivery capability supports all operating system platforms relevant to IBM's customers, not just Linux, and is an extension of IBM's On Demand strategy, which is now tied more closely to Linux, he said.
Handy said the solutions are also really rallying or starter points for the various engagements, and while these industry-based solution sets represent the top issues those customers are dealing with, if there is a solution or technology they have that is not part of the set, IBM installs it.
"We prefer our stuff but we'll install anybody's stuff and, so, if we have to install someone else's product, we'll do that," Handy said.
Martin Fink, the vice president and general manager of Hewlett-Packard Co.'s NonStop Enterprise Division of its Open Source and Linux Organization, said IBM's change in strategy indicated they were being called to the carpet by customers to make their execution match the message.
Steve Mills, IBM's senior vice president for software, said the company firmly believes in the co-existence of open-source and proprietary software across its
solution stacks and offerings.
For businesses, the leveraging of value comes about through integration, and they want the certainty of openness, the freedom of choice and to take advantage of lower cost," Mills said at the recent LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco.
Thriving communities are also building up around these technologies and customers have the ability to leverage that, he said.
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Sunday, September 04, 2005
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