Market research organisation International Data Corp reckons that IBM’s announcement Integrating the Enterprise continues the transformation of the company’s high-end business by introducing both new market perspectives and products. Near-term issues are, as always, dominated by IBM’s ability to move mainframe hardware. IBM’s fourth quarter will get a strong boost from general availability of its two Thoroughbred 9021 models. Newly announced air-cooled and water-cooled machines will help soften any dip in business during the first half of 1992, believes IDC. However, IDC analyst Steve Josselyn thinks that until a larger percentage of customers have a greater understanding of IBM’s new hardware, networking and software tools that business will be soft. The fact remains that it will take at least until the third quarter of 1992 for penetration rates to approach the necessary 25% range. For the past year, IDC has maintained that IBM’s troubles were primarily related to two factors – availability of new technology machines and challenges of diffusing a tremendous mass of new technologies into an increasingly mature mainframe market. By announcing general availability of the ES/9000 820 and 900, by announcing shipment dates for four additional 9021 machines, and by introducing new higher-end 9121 models, IBM takes great strides towards solving the first problem. However, the second problem, of diffusing the new features and functions, still remains. And as IDC has said in the past, for IBM to exploit fully the competitive advantages that flow from controlling the S/390 architecture, it must get customers to adopt at least a baseline set of enabler technologies. Nonetheless, the priorities being communicated in the announcement and the structure of the announcement itself, in IDC’s opinion, indicate that IBM is dedicating itself to not only deliver product to an overall market, but to get critical sets of tools into and used by customer hands. The major theme of this announcement is Integrating the Enterprise. Obviously, this is an ambitious undertaking. Not surprisingly, therefore, this announcement, in many respects, is more complex than last year’s action. Whereas the issues of hysical and financial upgradeability dominated much of last year’s announcement, this year IBM’s ES/9000 processor pricing and upgrade strategy benefits from a year of familiarity. Most of the functions announced last year – new performance levels, ESCON, Sysplex, – were understandable, even if obviously only a beginning and difficult to commensurate in terms of benefits. This year’s announcement, on the other hand, doesn’t benefit from a focal point as readily obvious as new machines. The focus here is software and systems integration, by definition an amorphous topic. According to Josselyn, this is a transition announcement, one concerned not so much with technology discontinuities, but rather with scopes and rates of technology changes. ‘Integrating the Enterprise’ is a significant theme, but one that comprises dozens of major threads, each pushing hard in different directions. And the announcement does, indeed, push in so many directions that IBM recently undertook a reorganisation in part to pave the way for today. IBM’s official theme may be Integrating the Enterprise, but beneath those words are five important perspectives that will dominate IBM’s enterprise strategy for years to come. The first is that the announcement indicates a sense of urgency and a willingness to adopt new ways of business at IBM. The second is integrating the mainframe with the desktop – 10 years ago, IBM spoke of the need, over time, to incorporate the PC world into the glass house, today that imperative has been reversed: it is the mainframe that must be incorporated into the desktop world. Thirdly, the announcment was an openness manifesto as IBM derived much of its new language and perspectives from the open systems movement. Some, no doubt, will accuse IBM of expediency, but IDC’s sense is that the company is taking a realistic approach: no matter wha
t are the promises of newer, more open technologies, their adoption can’t be purchased at the tremendous cost of retiring all installed assets. However, two aspects are still missing – clear statements of intention about AIX and SAA integration and IBM perspectives on supporting IBM software on non-IBM platforms. The fourth perspective is partnerships and priorities.
Unprecedented use of partnerships
IBM’s relations with partners have grown in both numbers and magnitude over the past few years, but the scope and essential nature of the partnerships of this announcement are unprecedented – for example the use of Information Builder Inc’s EDA/SQL in the Information Warehouse. IBM’s actions indicate that priorities are swinging away from marketing point products to marketing cohesive collections of offerings derived from IBM and non-IBM sources. Finally, after a long absence, the systems marketing concept seems to have returned to IBM. The idea of selling not just disenfranchised products, programs and services, but what can be called us-age scenarios, is a significant step forward. From this announcement, IDC would translate Inte-grating the Enterprise as how Big Blue Plans Tra-nsforming the Mainframe Into an Enterprise Server.
