IBM to Sell Software Specialized for Industries

Boston Globe ^ | 12/1/2003 | Reuters

[yonif]

NEW YORK (Reuters) - International Business Machines Corp. said on Monday it would start selling specialized software for industries in January and focus its sales force more on business sector than brand to meet customer demand.

IBM spokesman Joe Stunkard said the company believes customers want to buy software that is already tailored to their industry, making it cheaper and easier to use.

[Paleo Conservative]

BM to Sell Software Specialized for Industries

As opposed to generic industries that make wigets.

[adam_az]

IBM has organized it's sales organizations by industry alignment for a long time. They are in a much better position than their main competitors in this space to turn their products into more vertically aligned packages.

Expect IBM to lead this trend, but expect it to eat into their substantial customization services revenue. On the other hand, I've seen IBM play parts of the company against each other before, in order to not have all their chickens in one proverbial pot, and see which method is more accepted by customers.

As an ex-IBM'er, I can describe IBM in one sentence:

"A conglomerate whose parts occasionally work towards a common goal, but never on purpose."

;)

[lelio]

The move will be a change from IBM's current practice of selling by brand as its sales force will increasingly focus on industries.

I could never understand "selling by brand" in the computer field. It works for ketchup, but when you're dealing with multi million dollar equipment sales or outsourcing relationships I would hope you aren't swayed by a "brand" as you're not dealing with IBM -- you're dealing with your individual project manager or programmer or whatnot.

Course I thought it was ridicilous of companies like Netscape to go public so what do I know.

[newheart]

Which industries?

[MainFrame65]

"... I could never understand "selling by brand" in the computer field. ..."

It depends on your age. I worked for IBM from 1965 to 1996, and consulted since then. The power of the IBM brand in the early days of the 360 systems was awesome. Many IT careers were built almost entirely on specifying IBM products for everything that it could supply to its customers. Very literally, specifying IBM was ALWAYS safe, and any other brand would have to be justified to upper management. At the peak of the large-mainframe business, the 390 system represented a significant fraction of both US business and US exports. The memory in these systems represented a very large part of all of the memory sold in those years.