IBM Eye

How many apps can you fit on one box ?

If it’s an IBM iSeries box, the answer seems to be - “as many as we can”.

I must do some research to find out exactly how many applications IBM are now bundling with new iSeries boxes - I know there’s quite a few of them. This is a good thing for SMB customers, and, if you take a long term view, also good for the Software Group.

See, for every license that IBM bundles with the iSeries, that’s less revenue for the Software Group. However, one could argue that the limited licenses included in the box (for example, 20 users of Portal Express), is just to whet the appetite of the customer, and they will then purchase more. Of course, for a 20 user customer, that’s unlikely to happen, but then again, there’s not much money to be made selling this software to 20 user shops, so why not bundle it with the hardware I say !

Lisa Vass writes for eWeek about some more bundled software coming: IBM Rolls Out Preloaded Content Management

IBM is gunning for SMBs who want to flip the switch on content management right out of the box.

To cater to the needs of smaller companies, Big Blue on Monday plans to announce a content management solution that’s packaged on its eServer iSeries boxes. iSeries boxes already come preloaded with storage, server, software, security and networking to run a business’s entire operations.

DB2 Content Manager Standard Edition 8.3 features search, document process management and a variety of viewing options. It’s designed to present content that includes scanned images, forms or documents.

Such material can be offloaded from clients and moved to a central, secure repository for storage and management—all the better to mine it for business intelligence.