By Timothy Prickett Morgan
IBM Corp will next week roll out the first in a series of Domino application bundles for its AS/400 Bumblebee Dedicated Servers for Domino. The Bumblebee servers, which were announced in late July, are special low-cost hardware platforms that have been tuned specifically to run Lotus Domino R5 messaging, groupware and workflow applications on the OS/400 operating system. The Bumblebees offer twice the band for the buck on Domino workloads compared to equivalent servers in the regular AS/400 line. IBM and Domino partners Binary Tree, Clear Technologies and Emerging Technologies Solutions will offer discounted hardware, software and services in the bundle, although the exact discounts are unknown.)
Binary Tree sells Domino-based business-to-business e-commerce software called ezMerchant; Clear Technologies sells a CRM suite called Engage; and Emerging Technologies sells an enterprise web portal and intranet for executive information systems called Business-in-a-Box. More Domino partners are expected to offer similar discounted bundles. Last year, Domino on the AS/400 pushed more the $500m in AS/400 hardware sales, a significant portion of overall hardware sales of about $3.3bn. This year, Domino sales are accelerating even as sales of AS/400 hardware to support legacy RPG applications and ERP suites has waned. IBM obviously hopes that SMB customers will find these Domino bundles attractive, and also thinks that existing AS/400 customers will buy one of these machines to extend their production software without disturbing it on their production machines.
