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Case Study: IBM Hosting
IBM is a key player in the web hosting industry and IBM has also achieved many customer wins. Large enterprise customers are continuing to shift to IBM, because of the fiscal strength in an environment where hosting start-ups remain questionable for deploying business-critical applications.
IBM has made a deal with Dow Chemical on November 16th to provide a five-year arrangement for the end-to-end web hosting services of the company. This contract covered all three stages of the Web production cycle - Development, Testing and Production Environments.
IBM is able to win the corporate customers just because of the result of large network of partners of the company. IBM not only brings a solid infrastructure; but also extensive online business practices. IBM has developed applications for many large-scale events and companies. The deeply rooted technology-background is a unique attribute that provides IBM a competitive advantage over other hosts.
IBM does have the advantage that the company can take software and services tried, tested and true for enterprises and scale them to meet the needs of SME hosting requirements. Obviously the average SME is not going to need the same hosting solutions as the huge corporations and e-Business sites, but they do want the reliability, speed and trust that is relative to the name IBM.
IBM is also focusing on the SME level and can also lower the costs for the entry-level business. IBM is thus very much flexible and can offer more attributes of self-services applications. Now, IBM is the one-stop-shop for SME, alleviating the hassle of having to go to different businesses to obtain the services.
IBM is also able to go to the market of the interest of the small-medium business environment with a predefined offering and thus allowing to get up and running very quickly at very low starting costs.
IBM has around 200 data center facilities around the world and is reinforcing global reach, both for the enterprise and SME hosting marketplaces. However, with more than 67 discrete web hosting offerings, and the added confusion of the application hosting, time will tell, whether IBM can achieve simultaneous success in serving both the enterprise and SME hosting platforms.
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