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Week’s Wrap Up: PartnerWorld, IBM Express Products and SMB ITSM

in Best Practices, IBM, Implementation, ITIL, ITSM, ITUP, Tivoli

I attended my first big IBM tradeshow this week called PartnerWorld. This is where over 1900 of IBM’s key partners from around the world converged on Las Vegas to network and learn about new programs for the partner network. I managed to stay away from the game tables and really take in how powerful the IBM partner network is and how committed to it IBM is. I’d say at least half of the booths/pods in the Solutions Center were exclusively for partner enablement. I’m very impressed.

I also met some great IBMers including Al Zollar (GM, Tivoli) and Alan Ganek (CTO, Tivoli and VP Autonomic Computing). I’m really interested in the IBM Business Innovation and Optimization group and what they’re doing across all of the SWG brands. This is some powerful stuff that crosses all the IT and business buzzwords (BPM, BPEL, Workflow, Process Modeling, BSM, BAM, Dashboards, ITSM, ITUP, ITIL, PRM-IT, etc.). I’ve got to get plugged into what this group is doing!

As I mentioned in a brief post this week, IBM’s new marketing campaign has me buzzing with thoughts. I’m very excited about the IBM “Express” concepts for their products and the focus on the SMB (100-1000 employees) market. I’m not up to speed on all of the plans for delivery of “Express” products yet, but I hope to see an ITSM story of some sort included. An entry level CCMDB to complement ITUP v2.0 would be cool laid out on DB2 Express and WebSphere Express all tied together with a nice SOA or ESB. šŸ™‚

Some thoughts I have and would like to collect feedback on for future posting:

– Average staff size of an IT shop in SMB (% or 1:x ratio?)
– Typical demands/pressures on IT shop in SMB (desktop support more than server/app??)
– ITSM success and process maturity within the typical SMB IT shop (time for process??)
– ITSM success stories (or failures/challenges) in SMB?
– Open source, no/low cost ITSM solutions, tools, etc. for SMB?
– Can ITSM implementations help SMB’s differentiate themselves from competitors?
– Can ITSM help an SMB be “best in class” or “out of class”?
– What’s the ROI story for ITSM in the SMB market?
– Is ITSM worth the effort in SMB?
– Is it any easier to implement ITSM in SMB?

Any comments of SMB experiences?