Targeting small and medium enterprises in India, IBM has come up with a new marketing initiative, “Blue Button”, designed to guide SMEs to buy IT with solutions (across hardware, software, services and consultation) to solve their business problems in real time.
Under the mid-market strategy, IBM is also investing in understanding the segment through IBM Research on Server Message Block (SMB) and Green, develop unique offerings, enhance market presence and bring forth financing options to SME clients.
Jyothi Sathyanathan, vice-president of ibm.com, IBM India South-Asia, said, “We expect the SMB market to witness a subdued growth of 9-10% largely on the back of credit crunch and not due to demand. We had earlier estimated it to grow in high double digits.
As of now, in the mid-market segment, we get in touch with 20,000-22,000 customers on a regular basis.” He added that the firm will extend the Blue Button strategy to 29 cities to cater to these clients.
For complicated requests, the firm will also bring forth business partners that will help to take a logical conclusion within four hours. For IBM, the mid-market segment is largely a customer base with 1,000 employees and the firm is competing with other players like HP, TCS and Wipro in this space.
“Some of our solutions are as low as 1,800 per user depending on the services. The total savings of our ‘smart business’ offering will depend on the solution, but 30% reductions in the cost of acquisition and 30% reduction in the cost of administration are minimal,” he said.
The firm is also launching six new service offerings for this market — data mobility, managed resiliency services, scalable modular server room (pilot in India), unified threat mitigation services and network operation centre inside.
Sathyananthan added that there is increased demand for standard size data centres amongst SMEs and these cater to almost 60-70% of most customer needs. IBM at the moment is looking at corporative banks, diaries, education and the manufacturing segment.
The firm is also targeting the telecom and banking space through its channel partners. Some of its clients are Kusumgar Corporates, Innovation AutoRisk, Sistema Shyam TeleServices, Kurmanchal Bank, HFCL and Mahesh Sahakari Bank.
In India, IBM plans an aggressive expansion into seven cities where it already exists. These are Lucknow, Vizag, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Ludhiana, Bhopal and Coimbatore.
IBM is also looking at Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal to target the SME segment. “Sri Lanka is one of the oldest IBM markets.
We want to now re-focus our customer contact there. In Bangladesh, we have presence in telecom and banking verticals through our channel partners, but we want to have our own presence now,” added Sathyanathan.