Enhancing the Client Experience #BDA13

Les Rechan and Niel Isford came up to wrap up the first day to talk about IBM’s focus on Client Experience.

• The products, as was noted earlier, are focusing on being Easy, Simple and Fast to make them easier to consume.
• From a licensing perspective IBM is working with clients on an IBM Unlimited License Agreement that is for multiple years, a single contract for many products and has identifiable, predictable costs until the agreement is renegotiated at the end of its term. This allows clients to use lots of products very flexibly for a known cost for multiple years. And IBM is not limiting this to very large agreements but is intending to deliver a low entry point.
• IBM has announced its intent to acquire SoftLayer and it planning a cloud services division focused on business solutions on IBM SmartCloud. IBM already has 80 software solutions available through SmartCloud and offers PaaS and IaaS  too. For example SPSS Analytical Decision Management (see our product review here) has been used to deliver a whole series of Analytic Answer solutions in the cloud.
• IBM is offering new hardware/software/project financing. These include financing for PureSystems, IBM Project Financing for the whole IT solution and more.

There’s also a serious focus on Go To Market around Industry Blueprints, Smart Solutions Team and Software/Services integrated centers of competence – all driven by the increased role of business buyers in projects.

• Industry Blueprints give new, less technical buyers a simpler and more consistent approach for buying capabilities.  They combine an industry and that industry’s imperatives. For specific solution areas within this they focus on a set of IBM industry solutions. These then pull in multiple product and service capabilities. All focused around an industry imperative.
• A new Industry Smarter Solutions Team aligns industry experts from software brands, from smarter commerce, smarter analytics, smarter cities and GBS. This team is engaged with a set of clients and aims to deliver an integrated value proposition with a faster time to value for business buyers.
• Integrated centers of competence are being developed that pull 650 labs services, GBS and software group people around customer, supply chain, risk/fraud/finance and social business layered on analytics, smarter process, information management and the mobile enterprise. These centers not only pull resources together to make it easy to find them it is also responsible for harvesting best practices.

IBM is clearly trying to respond to the growing power of business buyers, focused on outcomes not technology.