What If Yoda Ran IBM?

Esther Schindler writes to mention that one IT leader who came from big business found himself in quite another world when he transitioned into a smaller business, specifically with respect to the amount of attention from their vendors. He presents an amusing approach with a familiar twist. "Not only are the IBMs of the world leaving money on the table, they're also risking future sales. The IT leaders at small organizations will in many cases be employed by larger organizations someday. Why alienate them? Vendors could engage IT leaders in small organizations now and build brand loyalty. How could they make such a business model work? Let's imagine (with apologies to George Lucas) what Yoda might do if he were running a large consultancy."

Comments

IBM doesn't do much well at all...

[duffbeer703]

IBM's #1 advantage is they are on every government and big corporate preferred vendor list, because they have entrenched sales forces who are excellent at pitching to upper management. They are great with the mainframes too.

Other than that, what's good about them?

Servers:
IBM xSeries are junk
IBM iSeries are treading water and relegated to vertical markets
IBM pSeries makes Sun look cheap.

Software:
Tivoli - Sucks
DB2 - Ok
Lotus - Sucks
Rational - Double Sucks

Consulting services are the same as any big vendor. If you're the CIO of a small company, you're simply insane to expect IBM to give you the time of day -- why would they? They make more money collecting maintenance on shelfware from a big bank than they would providing actual service to you!

IBM has some really smart people tucked away somewhere. But to an IBM customer, dealing with IBM is like dealing with the IRS.

Re:IBM doesn't do much well at all...

[Nursie]

Why is the parent modded informative? All it does is sling mud.

What better products do you have to offer than rational?
Bonus points if it's something that comes with guarantees on reliability and support.

Who else makes a system as powerful and capable as z?

Extra credit - who designed the chips in all of the next gen consoles and is raking in the cash as a result?

I'm not any of those things you mention, but your rant is terribly shortsighted.

Re:IBM doesn't do much well at all...

[bhmit1]

IBM is a sales company first, a hardware company second, and a software company third, in that order.

I've come into deals where I have to take my hat off to the sales person because I have no understanding how they made the deal happen. That's as much a complement as it is a criticism.

The hardware is pretty decent, but you have to pay for quality and support. I don't know how many other vendors out there will be on-site in IBM's timeframe.

The software lineup is made by acquisition. The one line that I know a fair bit about, Tivoli, has dozens of products under the umbrella, and most all of them were other companies that used to be best of breed. So saying they suck makes an overly broad statement about a lineup of security, backup, monitoring, automation, and other tools where even the pickiest customer can find something they like. What the develop by acquisition strategy leads to are issues with consistency, direction, and migration paths which is bad if you're an existing customer on the old software. But at least theoretically (I'm too busy maintaining the old stuff) the new software shouldn't suck. Where you do hear a lot of disgruntled users are in the monitoring space where the old products aren't dying easily and IBM is acquiring too many new products leading to confusion and wait-and-see users, but that's one of many product lines under the umbrella.

Also, I'd say that Lotus deserves a bit of credit not as an email platform (square peg in a round hole), but as a collaboration and distributed database system. They had the corner on that market long before anyone else knew it existed.

$25,000 for disaster recovery?

[charlievarrick]

I've deployed systems for organizations 1/10 the size of what TFA describes that cost more than that.

If IBM could make money providing services to size X companies, they would.

If IBM doesn't want your business, take your business elsewhere.

And isn't developing a disaster recovery plan his job?

Let me see, now that he's got the whole "operational excellence" thing sorted out and he's made the "Executive Leadership Team" he wants to sit around all day dangling a whole $25K infront of consultants instead of, i don't know, fiquring out how to implement a disaster recovery plan .

I've lived some of this

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting as AC to protect ex-employer and his clients.

We were engaged to develop a large web app for a large not-for-profit (in the Care Sector) to replace their aged tape based mini-computers. We suggested IBM hosted services for hosting because of the incredible uptime you get with Linux VMs running on S390. IBM did not want to talk to the NFP directly however, despite their large (for that sector) annual budget. They wanted to have us acting as middlemen, for no apparent reason we could see. It was almost as if they didn't want to be seen 'hanging out with the spastic guy' - it was very weird.

I heard (I wasn't in the meeting where it was allegedly said by IBM) that IBM was only going to deal directly with large customers (i.e. Fortune 500 and Governments), and was building a network of 'Partners' who would manage 'smaller' clients. My colleague had the impression that 'manage' meant 'accept all risk'.

Re:finally!

[dwywit]

I have been saying this same thing for years with regards to IBM's AS/400 platform. Anybody who has every worked with one of these machines will tell you that they are absolutely, hands-down, the greatest database box available today.

Amen brother!

The only people running Os/400 are huge financial institutions who's annual I.T. budget ranges in the Millions of dollars.

Cite? My PPOE(2) had an annual IT budget around AUD$200K, and we managed to run as AS400 E35 + ~50 green-screen terminals and ~50 peecees on that. Try telling people that you could support 100 users on a "server" with 48MB (yes MEGABYTES) memory!

Yes, the HW and OS cost a lot of money to buy, and maintenance is a PITA. OTOH, you put a call in, and someone is there within agreed contract times to fix it, or escalate it. The machines just sit in a corner and run.... for years. The E35 ran for more than 10 years before it became economical to replace it - so they replaced it with NT servers, and we became used the BSOD in the server room.