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"When I hear 'IBM Global Services,' I think Fortune 500," Madison says. "It's still Big Blue."
Before busy IT execs get turned off by the slick new ad campaign ("IBM Express Advantage. It's that simple.") from New York agency Ogilvy & Mather or piles of new marketing material landing on their desks, let's look at the facts.
IBM's SMB division is already its fastest growing; the division grew at a rate of 6.5% in 2005. It counts 800,000 clients and contributed 20% of IBM's overall $91 billion in revenue last year. That translates to $16.4 billion.
Express Advantage components such as its concierge service make clear that the company "in an astute and somewhat out-of-character way has recognized that it's not always easy to do business with IBM," says an April 2006 report co-authored by Ray Boggs, vice president of SMB research at IDC who has tracked IBM for nearly two decades.
"The message is, 'We are beloved by the multitudes, but they think we are too expensive and complicated,'" says Boggs. "There's HP and Dell, sure. But it's the internal IBM stuff that keeps Solazzo and his team awake at night."
Concierges, catalogs and consulting services tailored for the midmarket can sound like a lot of malarkey, Boggs admits. "I was pretty skeptical at the start," he says. But it's not so easy for internal IBM projects to get the Express seal of approval, he says. "It's not a slam dunk. You can't say, 'I want the Express label on this.' They will send you back to the drawing board to make sure the implementation time is short enough; there are some set criteria."
Laurel Johnson, director of IT at Cole Harford, a $55-million supplier of disposable restaurant supplies in Overland Park, Kan., didn't realize she was about to become an IBM Express Managed Services showcase customer. All she'd done was ask her local business partner, ProActive Solutions, to scout out email management options.
Johnson had already heard good things about MessageLabs Ltd., and ProActive Solutions Inc. told her that IBM had recently joined forces with the email security company. "So IBM would be managing this hosted service," she says. "To us, that was wonderful. IBM gives us the best service and best machines." She's always had a special fondness for the AS/400. "The least babysitting you have to do is with an AS/400," the IT director says. "It's a great little box."
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