System iNetwork

May 27, 2009

IBM Tackles SMBs with Smart Cubes, Smart Market, and a Bit of i

IBM has officially launched its Smart Market effort in the United States. In addition to the pilot in India, U.S. small business customers can now buy the appliance-like IBM Smart Cubes that run IBM i or Linux--but the operating system is the last thing IBM is promoting with its new Smart Market efforts.

In fact, it takes a bit of digging to even find the specs on IBM's Smart Market site, and for good reason: Smart Market is designed to take the technology issues out the business equation. IBM's goal is to vastly reduce the complexity of selecting, installing, and managing a small business suite of applications. Customers still get the hardware, of course, along with whatever tax benefits they can eek out of buying a box, along with some peace of mind that not everything is yet up in the clouds. But IBM, it turns out, is the one-stop solution provider that does all the preinstallation and configuration work, plus provides optional support levels, including backup and recovery services.

All-in-One

Customers start by exploring the available solutions on IBM's Smart Market site by Industry, Product Category, Business Department, or even by Number of Employees. If you really dig into the marketplace, you can narrow your solution choices by "integrated platform". This brings up two options: IBM Smart Business Software Pack for SUSE (that would be Linux, of course), and IBM Smart Business Software Pack for i.

There are two dozen software solutions available for the IBM i-based Smart Cube so far, including several solutions from RJS Software Systems, like Document Management for Healthcare or for Manufacturing, a VoIP solution from Nortel, and backup/recovery offerings from Vision Solutions. All Smart Cubes also come with built-in security and back-office functionality such as email, calendaring and backup and recovery, which are then combined with the business applications customers find on IBM's Smart Market site.

Obviously IBM plans to grow the number of offerings.

As for the hardware, the IBM i version comes in a single Power Core with 4 GB of memory, 2 cores with 8 GB memory, or 4 cores and 16 GB of memory. As you might guess, these aren't running the fastest POWER6 processors available, and IBM seems to be doing its best to keep it simple: it's darn hard to track down the actual components of each Smart Cube; presumably the folks IBM is targeting could not only care less, they might be overwhelmed by too much information.

Everything Is Smart

Of course, what's an all-in-one solution without a help desk? Except, IBM's services start at the Smart Desk, which is a Web-enabled dashboard. Clients can use Smart Desk as a single-point- of-contact for Smart Business maintenance, IBM says, which lets them choose to update applications automatically or subscribe to an on-demand service. Plus, they can elect to have IBM contact
them if something is wrong with their system.

They can also use the dashboard to add cloud-based services like managed security and hosted back-up and recovery.

Along with it, you get Smart Support, which is a single point of entry for all support of solutions, IBM says. Clients can use an
integrated wizard to try to auto-fix a problem or look at user forums and support wikis to fix the problem themselves. If additional support is needed, IBM has its IBM Smart Business Support team, which is there to assist with common usage issues, handle hardware and software defects, accept product or support improvement ideas, and act as a problem management focal point until the problem is resolved.

All in all, this is a particularly interesting initiative. The use of IBM i makes sense in this situation--if IBM is going to support small clients, why wouldn't they want to be running a low-maintenance system? Of course, they would. As for Linux, you've got a proven solution with little cost associated with it. Also a no-brainer.

IBM launched this program last week, leading with a Smart Cube running Intuit's QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions financial management software pre-integrated (though it only runs on Linux). IBM's installation sheet is also astoundingly simple and to the point--it basically guides a customer through plugging in and connecting the system to the Web, followed by running a simple wizard. It seems as if it's designed to be as simple as opening up a consumer desktop system, minus any manuals or included CDs.

Definitely something to keep an eye on.

Posted by cmaxcer at May 27, 2009 10:42 AM