IBM Targets Chinese Small Businesses
In a move to increase its presence with small and medium
enterprises (SMEs) in the Chinese market, IBM has launched
a new marketing campaign which combines hardware, software,
services and financing in one package.
In its move to the "software as services" business
model, IBM Global Services has been aggressive in the
Fortune 500 market, but marketing to SMEs is new. As part
of this model, IBM has put its considerable technology
and marketing muscle behind the Linux movement, which
is based on the open-source model. In this business model,
IBM offers the software and applications for free, but
sells hardware and consulting.
This new marketing campaign target SMEs in the central
and eastern China, where more than 2/3s of China's businesses
are. An additional aim is to help the target companies
put their services online, so that they can handle online
transactions and order processing on the Internet. To
coordinate the new campaign, IBM has launched a new Chinese-language
IBM Solutions Center at http://www-900.ibm.com/cn/solutions/
On this website, potential customers are able to access
proposed IBM solutions to bring their businesses online
in a short timeframe.
The "software as services" model runs against
the traditional "software as product" model,
which is championed by Microsoft and Oracle. Microsoft
products have been a success with the consumer or client,
but have been facing tough competition heading into the
enterprise market. Oracle has been successful with its
database products in large and medium sized corporations,
but now that the market is largely saturated, it wants
to expand into enterprise applications. This area is now
dominated by SAP and Peoplesoft. Oracle is now making
a hostile bid for Peoplesoft.
In the past three years, Microsoft China has suffered
setbacks
as the Chinese government has thrown its support behind
Linux. In the nineties, Bill Gates was seen a business
hero in China as Microsoft grew, but in later years that
image has been replaced with a more negative image because
Microsoft controls its own source code.
In recent weeks, there has been speculation that the
governments of China, South Korea and Japan would support
the development of a new Linux operating system, but so
far, this has been unconfirmed.
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