Small business.International Business Machines Corp. has launched what it calls the industry's first portfolio of offerings and programs designed and priced specifically for medium-sized Me´di`um-sized` a. 1. Having a medium size; as, a medium-sized man s>. Adj. 1. medium-sized - intermediate in size medium-size, moderate-size, moderate-sized business customers, including new software for rapidly building e-commerce e-commerce, commerce conducted over the Internet, most often via the World Wide Web. E-commerce can apply to purchases made through the Web or to business-to-business activities such as inventory transfers. sites and a new Linux-based portal solution to enhance office productivity through customized access to business tools and information. The portfolio will consist of new hardware, software, services, solutions and financing. All are designed to meet specific criteria for medium-sized businesses with respect to function, ease of use and management, and price--a set of brand attributes delivered under the name Express. The offerings within this new IBM (International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY, www.ibm.com) The world's largest computer company. IBM's product lines include the S/390 mainframes (zSeries), AS/400 midrange business systems (iSeries), RS/6000 workstations and servers (pSeries), Intel-based servers (xSeries) Express portfolio will assist medium-sized business--companies with between 100 and 1,000 employees that often have fewer IT skills and tighter budgets than larger enterprises--in their transformation to on-demand On-Demand refers to a service or feature which addresses the user's need for instant gratification and immediacy of use. In most cases the value proposition for an on-demand service is wrapped up in the fact that the user or consumer of the service avoids a significant up-front businesses using IBM's open standards-based technology. The new WebSphere A family of Java development and Web application server products from IBM that run in an open, Eclipse-technology based environment on OS/390, OS/400, NT/2000, Linux and various Unix platforms. Commerce-Express, IBM says, is designed to enable medium-sized companies to create and manage e-commerce sites in fewer steps than the comparable offering from Microsoft, and at a lower price point. The new portal solution combines the power of an eServer xSeries system with the scalability of WebSphere Portal Express to make it easier for employees to access, customize and manage, in one place, all the critical knowledge and content-management tools they need to operate efficiently in a busy office environment. In a recent survey conducted by Nielsen ReelResearch on behalf of IBM, more than half of small and medium-sized businesses respondents In the context of marketing research, a representative sample drawn from a larger population of people from whom information is collected and used to develop or confirm marketing strategy. said information technology will be more important in helping their company achieve its business objectives in the next year. Yet most respondents believe that business solutions are still designed, developed and priced for large companies. IBM has already launched several Express middleware Software that functions as a conversion or translation layer. It is also a consolidator and integrator. Custom-programmed middleware solutions have been developed for decades to enable one application to communicate with another that either runs on a different platform or comes from a software products, including WebSphere Application Server Express, DB2 Express and WebSphere Portal Express. DB2 Express, for example, is priced at $499 for a base server package, with an additional licensing cost of $99 per user, and installs in 15 minutes. |
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