IBM Rolls Out Lab Services For PureSystems Integration
July 23, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Starting next month, the techies from the various divisions of IBM‘s Systems and Technology Group are going to be peddling yet another bunch of services to help customers integrate their existing systems with new PureSystems modular gear. In announcement letter 612-027, you’ll find the IBM Systems Lab Services is offering what it calls ServiceUnits for premium, remote, and local services, all of which are designed to help customers adopt new technologies and integrate them with their existing systems. In this case, IBM is offering QuickStart services for PureFlex Standard, Express, and Enterprise Editions (those are varying degrees of complexity in the PureSystem modular stack), as well as for the SmartCloud Entry private cloud controller. The service is for one eight-hour day of a single consultant, and you don’t have to have any particular hardware installed to do the services engagement. But you do have to have an “opportunity manager” put together a scope of work to come up with a to-do list for you for those eight hours. The details are intentionally vague in this services engagement, but you can see from the announcement letter that someone on Systems and Technology Group is still rebelling against the system naming conventions, since it says engagements are available for customers with System i, System p, System z, and System x iron. There is no System i or System p anymore, of course–just Power Systems. There are also integration services to help customers figure out how to make their storage play nicely with PureSystem iron. In a refreshing move, the pricing is exactly the same for the services engagements regardless of the platform you are coming from, and in an even more stunning move, IBM supplied pricing for the engagements. A local or remote assistance engagement at the standard level costs $3,125, while a premium solution engagement costs $4,000 per day. (Kudos to Systems and Technology Group for being open and honest about this.) That price includes any travel and expenses that IBMers incur. Business partners can also engage these services with IBM as part of their systems integration efforts for PureSystems. The services will be available August 1. RELATED STORIES IBM Tweaks Flex Prices, Offers Flex Services IBM Beats Out Cisco For Modular Server Deal A Closer Look At The Flex System Iron IBM Launches Hybrid, Flexible Systems Into The Data Center Some Thoughts About IBM’s Next Generation Platform IBM’s Next Generation Platform Prepped For Launch Flex Platform: An IBM System That Goes With The Tech Flow Big Blue’s Software Gurus Rethink Systems
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