IBM SMB Analyst Summit: Enterprise and SMB

I’m at the Rye Town Hilton for the IBM SMB analyst summit this morning, it goes into tomorrow as well. From the 3 I’ve been to, IBM always puts on lush summits in nice hotels. True, except for the mainframe summit this year, they’re usually in the suburbs (Stamford, Rye Town) of New York instead of the city itself, but once you get there, everything is very well done.

I have two expectations going in:

• As James said last May, “When IBM bought Informix it initially classified Sears as a medium-sized customer.”
• IBM’s approach to selling SMBs — IBM scale and “the rest of us scale” — is to partner with people to build out channels instead of directly selling to those SMB accounts.
• IBM wants to sell more to SMBs. As I tell many IBM folks, any discussion between RedMonk and IBM that lasts more than 30 minutes inevitably comes to the topic of selling into the long tail. This is part due to RedMonk’s bottom-up affinity, but also seems like a genuine desire on IBM’s part.

Sidenote: Eclipse, BI

One “jump” in thinking is to look at Eclipse as a way, or “channel,” to reach SMBs. It’s certainly doing well “selling” to the long tail of development, and with things like BIRT, Eclipse, along with other new BI vendors, projects, and services, are helping create and getting into new long tail markets.

When it comes to that space, the SMB BI market is largely being built out at the moment as the idea that analytics is only for the enterprise is being exploded by the availability of free/open source tools and databases. More importantly, the concepts of BI are and need to be transformed to fit the needs and desires of non-enterprise users.

Bringing Enterprisey Down from the Mountain

While I’ve said many times that consumer-tech is driving business-tech, I’ve also noticed that many of the new tech companies are bringing enterprise features down to the SMB market. For me, this is especially present in the systems management companies that I watch and talk with, like Hyperic, FiveRuns, and even SpiceWorks.

In systems management, the systems management 2.0 companies each say, truthfully so, that they’re simplifying systems management. In doing so, they often suck in usability and even back-end patterns from consumer-tech. But, the functionality that they provide is going along the same path as the existing systems management vendors. For the most part, if the current feature-projection of each company continues, in a few more releases, they’ll be able to match the breadth of Big 4 functionality.

Now, the question of being able to scale both technologically and in their customer relationships, like support, is the grinning elephant in the room…and mainframes. But here I am getting distracted by one of my favorite topics…

The Enterprise/SMB Feature Cycle

The larger point is this, companies like IBM that have a bevy of “enterprise grade” features can follow the below cycle:

In a very large way, “open source” can be switched out for SMBs.

I’ll see if that model helps add a new dimension to the discusion over the next two days.

Disclaimer: IBM, Eclipse, FiveRuns, and Spiceworks are clients. IBM paid for my T&E up to Rye Town.

Tags: eclipse, fiveruns, ibm, ibmsmbsummit, productmanagement, smb