IBM to customers: Expect business as usual
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IBM may be selling its PC business, but it&#39;s working hard to keep its PC customers. Still, competitors Dell, Hewlett-Packard and others are likely to come knocking in an attempt to pick off nervous customers
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Hoping to speed acceptance of its service-oriented architecture initiative, IBM at last has rolled out a new service to help corporate users shape their projects to better fit their business goals.
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IBM Corp. expects about $1 billion in revenue from India, as the company&#39;s hardware and services business in the local market soars.The company made $700 million in revenue from India last year, said a company spokesman Monday. In the first three quarters of this year, the company posted revenue growth of 39 percent over the previous year. &quot;At the current growth rates, we expect revenue of $1 billion for the year,&quot; the spokesman added.Unlike Indian outsourcers who have mainly focused on more lucrative contracts abroad, multinational services companies like IBM have focused on the growing Indian outsourcing market.IBM India&#39;s contribution to IBM&#39;s global revenue is higher if the revenues from services delivered from India to global customers are also included. These are higher than domestic revenue and growing faster, said the IBM spokesman who did not give exact figures. This is however included in the revenue of the country in which the services have been contracted, and are not reflected in IBM&#39;s India revenues, he added.India is a key hub for the global delivery of services by IBM, as the company takes advantage of the country&#39;s large pool of skilled manpower.Reports, including in The Wall Street Journal, quoted an IBM official in the U.S. as saying that the company has increased its staff in India to 73,000 this year. The IBM India spokesman was unable to confirm this data immediately, but he confirmed that the company had 53,000 staff in the country at the end of last year.Although the company does not break down the number of staff it has in offshore software development and services in India, most of the new additions are likely to have been made in the company&#39;s outsourcing operations based in India, with the rest of the additions in sales and marketing.The expansion by IBM in India comes even as staff availability there has gotten tighter and salaries are on the increase. India is still attractive to foreign companies to set up software development and services subsidiaries or outsource work, as salaries are still competitive and the talent pool is large, said Siddharth Pai, a partner at outsourcing consultancy firm Technology Partners International Inc (TPI) in Houston, in an interview last month.
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Expenses surge Every quarter IBM orders investors to pay attention to a particular product group as the driver of its success. For this year's second quarter, IBM has promoted the software division as its savior. That's software - not services. Got it?â¦
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By Frank Norton and Anne Krishnan, The News & Observer, Raleigh, N.C.  May 30--Lenovo, which is trying to increase sales of its computers to consumers and small businesses, is teaming with IBM to roll out a new technical support service for those customers.
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com. IBM on Monday unveiled a technology lab for customers looking to test the company&#39;s products for managing computer resources based on business demands.
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IBM Corp. hopes a new effort to simplify programming for mainframe computers helps keep those warhorses competitive.
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IBM IBM.N on Friday will take  aim at the heart of data storage equipment leader EMC Corp.'s  EMC.N market with a product that will allow EMC buyers to  switch to IBM.
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Investor's Business Daily - Though new rumors have surfaced that IBM might buy chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices, many analysts doubt it will happen.
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NEW YORK--IBM has introduced two new storage products that the company said provides customers with better performance at a lower cost.
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With consolidation at a fever pitch in the enterprise BI (business intelligence) market, it would be understandable if MicroStrategy customers felt nervous, given that the vendor remains as one of the market&#39;s few independents.After all,&#160;Business Objects now has the support of new parent company SAP, thanks to a $6.7 billion acquisition, while&#160;Hyperion is now part of Oracle, which spent $3.3 billion to buy it. Meanwhile,&#160;IBM is expected to soon finalize its $5 billion purchase of Cognos.Yet, MicroStrategy customers interviewed at the company&#39;s MicroStrategy World 2008 conference in Miami expressed confidence in the vendor and said its independent status gives it certain advantages over Business Objects, SAP, and Cognos.In particular, several customers said they like that MicroStrategy will remain free of pressures stemming from having to prioritize supporting complementary products from a parent company and, conversely, diluting support for similar products from competing companies.Lindsey Aubuchon, MIS director at W.E. Aubuchon, which operates hardware stores in New England, said her company likes to have flexibility to mix and match IT products as it sees fit, creating multi-vendor environments to achieve its desired implementations. &quot;My company likes to have openness to choose what they want,&quot; said Aubuchon, whose employer has been a MicroStrategy customer for about seven years.Consequently, she nodded in agreement when MicroStrategy&#39;s CEO Michael Saylor said in his keynote at the event that the vendor strives to be agnostic and neutral with respect to making its products work with complementary wares from other vendors.&quot;Our view is to be Switzerland in this business, and to make sure we protect your investment when we give you the ability to tap into lots of different vendors and technology architectures to achieve your goal,&quot; Saylor said.He predicted that Cognos, Business Objects and Hyperion will see their product roadmaps re-routed based on competitive considerations handed down by their new parent companies.As an independent, MicroStrategy will continue to support a wide variety of complementary, third-party products, such as Web browsers, operating systems, processors, databases and application servers, based on the needs of its customers and on market dynamics, Saylor said. &quot;The market needs a vendor that provides the flexibility we can provide,&quot; he said.Phillip Julian, sales operations and senior data management analyst at Inspire Pharmaceuticals in Durham, North Carolina, is all for product agnosticism and flexibility in IT vendors. The company recently acquired the MicroStrategy software to generate better, more interactive and visually appealing reports, he said. Until now, Inspire had been analyzing data with SAS Institute data-mining software and creating reports with Microsoft&#39;s Excel.&quot;We&#39;re doing it so we get into really good technology that would help us grow,&quot; Julian said. &quot;I want to move us into another generation [of reporting software] where we&#39;re looking at something that&#39;s more graphical, more visual. We need to have something that the VP of sales and the sales force can understand.&quot;Similar expectations led Robeks, a chain of fruit juice establishments, to make a hefty investment in the MicroStrategy platform, which it is in the process of implementing. With most of its presence in the U.S. West Coast, Manhattan Beach, California-based Robeks is looking to grow significantly in other parts of the U.S. and the world in the coming years, and, to support those efforts, it needs better reporting and analysis tools than the in-house ones it currently uses.&quot;Being able to analyze [sales and marketing] data more accurately will help us grow the business. We&#39;re in a very quick growth mode right now,&quot; said IS Director Pete Carvajal.As a new customer, he was interested in hearing Saylor address the recent wave of market consolidation to find out what MicroStrategy&#39;s position is. &quot;Them emphasizing that they&#39;re one of the players in the market that&#39;s not in the middle of all the turmoil of all the consolidation was good to hear and to understand what the future is,&quot; he said.&quot;It&#39;s important for them to come out and indicate the whys and whens of their business model moving forward. This is a huge investment for my company, and the last thing I want to do is spend all this time and money in an application that gets absorbed by a bigger company and maybe disappears,&quot; Carvajal said.
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It may be too early to talk plug-and-play but IBM Corp. believes it can help businesses of all sizes easily cluster their servers to handle intensive computing workloads.
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Investor's Business Daily - IBM is ironing out some scheduling problems for the steel industry.
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GridWorld -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced new software that allows clients to transform their existing technology infrastructures into dynamic, virtualized environments that can be more efficient to run, easier to manage and use less power and space.
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IBM Corp. on Tuesday will announce an expansion of its services for companies seeking help with radio frequency identification (RFID) technology.
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IBM Tuesday will announce an expansion of its services for companies seeking help with radio frequency identification technology. Over the past several months, IBM has developed RFID services
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IBM on Monday unveiled a technology lab for customers looking to test the company&#39;s products for managing computer resources based on business demands.