By William Fellows
IBM Corp has thrown its weight behind the emerging market for appliance or ‘thin’ servers with the acquisition of Foster City, California-based Whistle Communications Inc on undisclosed terms. Whistle will be used to flesh out IBM’s small to medium-sized business campaign to which it has committed a $100m marketing spend. It will target Whistle’s InterJet servers at Soho small and home office users and small businesses with up to 100 employees. Whistle competes with the likes of Encanto Networks and Cobalt Networks. The likelihood is that IBM will use components of the WhistleWare software environment on other products are create new appliances to serve more dedicated applications.
IBM’s small VAR partners will be the primary channel for the $2,000 to $3,500 InterJet PC servers which run WhistleWare software, combining web-based administration and caching, email, web access and publishing, file, print, fax and scanning under one hood. The functionality is similar to that which Hewlett- Packard Co offers to the Soho market. Additional IBM e-business and other services will be integrated into the Whistle InterJet server and IBM promises to make InterJet more affordable.
Whistle, which was looking for a third round of venture funding, is said to have had a much higher burn rate than competitors being focused on direct sales; Encanto signed up ISPs to peddle its products their customers.
IP messaging server company Mirapoint Inc says that IBM’s acquisition of 75-person Whistle Communications is a great thing for the appliance server market in general. It legitimizes it, the company says. Mirapoint doesn’t expect the combination to be a threat because its own $10,000 to $50,000 products play at the high-end of the market. At the low end of the appliance server market are the web caching companies, including solutions from Compaq Computer. รก
