Did anyone know that IBM was a webhost? Not the signup-and-get-a-free-domain kind, but the services-provider-for-companies-needing-distributed-data-centers kind. I had never heard that but I guess it makes sense. 5 Years ago there were a slew of articles about IBM as a big time web design firm with a division somewhere like Atlanta I think with guys wearing jams and playing ping pong. Anyway, I saw a Gartner Group report (PDF), listing IBM as #2 (they were #1 until this month) The magic-quadrant report rated companies meeting the following requirements:

  • Must sell managed, dedicated hosting as a stand alone service without the requirement to bundle it with application development, application management or other outsourcing.
  • They must have had web-hosting-related revenue of at least $50 million in 2005
  • They must offer managed, dedicated web-hosting services in at least 2 data centers that they own of lease, located in different regions of North America
  • They must sell to customers throughout the continental US and be able to serve Canadian companies as well.

Here’s a PR type article on a hosting contract IBM won for retailer Hudson’s Bay Company (hbc.com).

Lastly, I found an article called “IBM as a Webhost“. The article is one of those written-for-submission-to-article-directories articles, so it’s on about 500 websites, and it’s old as sin - the deal with Dow Chemical it speaks of was announced last November. Still I enjoyed a couple parts. The article talks about IBM’s partnerships with multiple telcos and how that redundancy helps win contracts. Anyhow, here’s a quote I liked:

Paul Boulay, Program Director, Global Application Services for IBM Global Services notes that IBM is the one-stop-shop for SME, alleviating the hassle of having to go to different businesses to obtain the services they need.

“Especially of interest in the small-medium business environment, where in the past the getting-started price tag was almost an automatic inhibitor, we’re able to go to that market segment now with a predefined offering allowing them to get up and running very quickly at very low starting costs,” Boulay explains. “Some of our entry-level offerings are
priced well below $20,000 a month, which is extremely favorable for these types of applications.”

I get a kick out of the Small Medium Size Business division talking about pricing of under $20K / month. That’s a pretty penny, but I guess for company where downtime is priced in the thousands (or much more) per minute it might be a good buy. But companies fitting that description have always been big companies in my experience.

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