VARBusiness Honors IBM With Tech Innovator of the Year Award

IBM Is Recognized for Its Express Managed Services Portfolio Targeted for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses

ARMONK, NY - 26 Oct 2006: IBM (NYSE: IBM), the global information technology services leader, today announced that it has been chosen to receive the prestigious VARBusiness Tech Innovator of the Year Award. IBM received the award based on its Express Managed Services Portfolio for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

The VARBusiness Tech Innovators’ project is based on channel partners’ assessments of technical innovation and development efforts of vendors. IBM was honored this week at the CMP XChange Tech Innovators conference in Huntington Beach, California. VARBusiness is one of the leading channel publications in the United States.

“Innovations like what we’ve seen from IBM demonstrate the vibrancy and vitality of the industry,” said Lawrence M. Walsh, VARBusiness Editor. “They represent breakthroughs that will benefit our solution-provider readers and, in turn, the users of technology.”

“IBM is honored to have our services recognized as making our clients more innovative,” said Jim Corgel, IBM general manager, Global Services, Small and Medium-Sized Businesses. “IBM is committed to working with our business partners to provide solutions specifically designed for small and medium-sized business -- IBM’s Express Managed Services are proof of this commitment.”

IBM’s Express Managed Services were built specifically for SMBs to be easy to understand, implement and manage and are priced to fit mid-market budgets. The Express Managed Services Portfolio was also designed to be sold primarily through the Business Partner channel. Easy-to-sell, packaged offerings such as email security, online backup for distributed servers and desktop management are designed to be bundled with IBM Business Partners to create high-value solutions that better meet customer requirements.

“IBM’s broad range of new solutions for our small business customers is impressive,” said William Abram, President of Pragmatix, an IBM business partner based in Elmsford, New York. “We’re clearly able to demonstrate how using IBM’s managed services, like email and web security, online backup, and desktop management services, allow customers to focus on their core business by letting IBM’s experts handle day-to-day IT tasks. We’ve never seen anything like the Express Managed Services Portfolio before from IBM.”

According to AMI Partners, the managed services market is forecasted to grow to $163 billion by 2010, which marks a significant shift in the way SMBs are evaluating and purchasing IT services.

IBM also received two other top awards from VARBusiness, including: Tech Innovator Company of the Year and Tech Innovator of the Year award for IBM Continuous Data Protection for Files in the Storage category.

For more information about IBM and VARBusiness visit www.ibm.com or www.varbusiness.com.

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Contact Information

Jenna Gable

IBM Media Relations

IBM

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