By Ramdas S
IBM India is keenly working at changing the market perception that its flagship infrastructure management software, Tivoli, is meant only for large enterprises. The company is in the process of creating an aggressive customer and channel marketing campaign to sell Tivoli to SMBs.
“Tivoli has the best of breed IT management tools and has a large based of deployments in large enterprises. This has created a perception among solutions providers (SPs) and SMBs that it’s a product that is difficult and unaffordable to deploy. However this is a big myth and to break it we are engaging with tier-2 SPs to show them how Tivoli can be either sold to customers or used by them to provide remote management services to their customers,” said Anil Menon, VP, Channels, Software Group, IBM India-South Asia.
Currently IBM has 16 tier-1 partners that specialize in deploying Tivoli products among large enterprises. The focus now is to work with distributors Ingram Micro, Redington and Avnet activate and engage with tier-2 systems integrators and SPs. IBM has already done some spade work on this front over the last few months, and has created a network of 45 tier-2 partners with the skill-sets to deploy and manage Tivoli.
Menon’s team is looking at engaging closely with IBM’s Business Partner Organization to rope in more partners. “We are looking at adding more tier-2 partners and will also upgrade a few of our tier-2 partners to level one,” said Menon.
IBM has launched a portal called Skillyatra.com to help partners learn more about Tivoli and other IBM software products. While the site offers online training, IBM plans to soon roll out a 12-city offline training program. “We have a number of training programs, all offered free to partners. In fact, some of our key partners receive up to $50,000 worth of free certification training in a year,” informed Menon.
Emphasizing the ease-of-use of Tivoli, Menon said, “Many of the systems management tools in Tivoli are used to provide remote services to home users. For instance, the Tivoli Continuous Data Protection Software is used independently by several system builders to provide data backup and protection services to home users,” informed Menon.
However Menon stresses that the real connect will be through SMB partners. “Today’s SMBs are likely to be tomorrow’s large or medium sized businesses, and they all require an infrastructure management platform that they can grow with. With Tivoli you can start small and our modularity allows you to scale up infrastructure easily,” asserted Menon.
Further, IBM is targeting small and large service providers who are looking to go beyond pure break-fix model. “If you plan to offer infrastructure management solutions remotely or otherwise, we have some interesting and flexible licensing models.” |