IBM to offer small firms more
Published: 10 Oct 2005 09:55 BST
IBM plans to announce Monday nearly two dozen new offerings for SMEs as part of its Express Portfolio.
IBM will unveil 22 new products and services, marking the single largest rollout in its three-year-old Express Portfolio lineup. For IBM, the SME arena is worth trolling, given its estimated $360bn (£204bn) market size.
"The SME market has hundreds of thousands of customers, a high growth rate and special needs," said Elaine Case, director of IBM's SME unit.
IBM's new Express Portfolio offerings will include RFID managed services for retailers, medical imaging storage for health care companies and online backup and email recovery.
"RFID managed services has been available for enterprise customers, and now SME customers will have access. They can convert bar codes to RFID," Case said.
The IBM Express RFID Services slap and ship managed services will cost $830 per month under a three-year contract.
Approximately 70 percent of the new product offerings are in the managed services area, because SME customers often cannot afford to purchase the hardware and software or don't have a desire to operate it, Case noted.
The Express Portfolio now encompasses over 120 products and services, with the addition of the 22 new offerings.
Case noted that the Express Portfolio was developed with a certain set criteria that products and services had to meet in order to be included. As a result, a number of IBM's existing offerings that catered to corporate customers did not fit the bill and often could not be retooled to serve the SME market.
"There was a realisation that we, and the industry, were underserving the SME market," Case said.
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