IBM Announces New Software Offerings for Growing Mid-Market Businesses

New Tivoli Products Enable Sales Channel in Green and Service Management Opportunities




ORLANDO, FL - May 2008: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today expanded its support for growing mid-market businesses by announcing new Tivoli software offerings designed to help customers manage their businesses more effectively, and a new Tivoli Deployment Accreditation initiative that recognizes business partners who have built skills around Tivoli’s broad suite of service management offerings to better meet the needs of these customers.

The new Tivoli software offerings expand upon offerings IBM announced last October, and is part of IBM’s ongoing commitment to assist growing mid-sized businesses to choose the right solutions to better manage their network infrastructures. In addition, IBM is delivering innovative tools to help these customers identify issues such as systems management, asset protection or data recovery, and find highly skilled Tivoli software resellers who can solve them.

Announced today are IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Microsoft Applications and IBM Maximo Asset Management Essentials which have been customized to meet the unique requirements of growing businesses. The latter provides all of the core capabilities for managing critical assets in an enterprise -- including production equipment, facilities and transportation assets -- with a simple licensing, pricing and packaging approach.

These solutions solve some of the most pressing issues today by reducing operational expense and providing critical IT and business asset management. They also enable customers to gain many of the same efficiencies that larger businesses are achieving from IBM’s green and service management offerings.

Like large enterprises, small and medium businesses are faced with the challenge of improving the efficiency of their IT environments, controlling energy consumption and reducing costs while ensuring that their IT infrastructure is supporting the needs of the business. With IBM’s broad range of scalable solutions that address data backup & recovery, detection, asset protection, security and systems automation, growing businesses can get started at the level of function they need to help grow their business.

“IBM continues its commitment to developing the right products for growing mid-sized businesses and is now making it easier to connect with local accredited Business Partners to help them support their business initiatives,” said Doug Brown, vice president marketing, IBM Tivoli. IBM generally defines the growing mid-sized businesses as those having between 1,000 and 5,000 employees.

The thousands of solution providers -- including resellers, distributors and independent software vendors -- that IBM partners with, have unique relationships with small and mid-sized customers and are a key route to market for IBM in reaching these companies. With today’s announcement, IBM is helping these partners increase their skills around selling and deploying key products while providing the credentials to represent those skills with customers.

The new Tivoli Deployment Accreditation initiative offers IBM Business Partners the ability to achieve skills and certify in three levels of accreditation ranging from expertise in either individual products or a combination of products that provide an overall solution to customers. A-level Tivoli Deployment Accreditation offers certification to firms with one expert in an individual product and one expert in a solution area, AA-level provides for a total of four experts, and AAA-level a total of six experts.

“The Tivoli Deployment Accreditation offers a clear direction for IBM Business Partners on how to build skills in the Tivoli suite of products and benefit from opportunities in key growth areas including green IT and service management,” said Michele Grieshaber, director of SMB and channel marketing, Tivoli Software. “Partners who make this investment will distinguish their offerings and skills from others in the industry.”

The certification includes a broad range of Tivoli products including those covering the Netcool, Maximo, Enterprise Asset Management, Service Request Management, Optimization, Storage and Availability portfolios. These offerings are among the products playing a key role in helping businesses expand their involvement in green and service management spaces. For example, Tivoli Monitoring accesses, displays and provides energy management information and settings that enable the optimization of IT and facility assets. Monitoring capabilities alert data center managers to energy related situations while reporting capabilities provides historical trending and forecasting to enable better precision in data center and facility planning.

“We see significant value in the investment we are making to become an IBM accredited Tivoli business partner,” said Mike Fischer, Executive Vice President, Enterprise Solutions Group, MSI Systems Integrators, IBM Business Partner. “This presents us with an opportunity to differentiate ourselves in the marketplace and broaden our exposure to both our clients and prospects, as well as among IBM sellers and other business partners for joint partnering opportunities.”

The goal of this initiative is to build an even stronger partner ecosystem and offer clients an opportunity to identify IBM business partners with specific skills to help them choose the right solutions and implement them quickly and efficiently. With the new Tivoli Deployment Accreditation Partner Finder tool, customers can now find a list of accredited Business Partner with certified Tivoli skills in one or more solution product area in a location near them. The partner finder tool can be viewed on the Tivoli SMB customer sitelet at www.ibm.com/tivoli/smb.

The Tivoli Deployment Accreditation is available to all IBM Business Partner worldwide. More information on the program can be obtained at www.ibm.com/tivoli/partners.