IBM Europe Gives Rebates To Power Resellers Who Push ISV Wares

January 21, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

As we report elsewhere in this issue, IBM‘s customers in the United States are being treated to a sweetened trade-in deal if they are buying new Power7 or Power7+ iron and trade-in old Power or non-IBM iron in the process. IBM Europe is taking a slightly different approach in a deal that it announced last week: it will pay Power System resellers an extra rebate it they peddle the boxes with specific software created by third parties.

In announcement letter ZA13-1004, which came out on January 15, IBM says that it will pay “business partner solution providers,” perhaps the most nebulous string of words I saw last week, “an additional rebate for every deal they close that involves a qualifying ISV and an ISV solution.”

The deals are not automagic, as ISV-related rebate schemes have been in the past, and in fact you have to submit a marketing plan to the Power Systems channel manager in your region of Europe and get it approved–including details of the ISVs involved in the deal and the expected revenues in the deal–before you can lay claim to the rebate.

What is set in the deal is the amount of the incremental rebate that IBM is willing to pass on to make the deal better for the business partner. And, as I have seen in similar deals in the past, the deal is better, meaning the rebate is larger if it is done on the IBM i operating system compared to on AIX or Linux. The rebates are reckoned in US dollars, with a set table for conversion rates to European currencies, and they range from a low of $750 on a BladeCenter JS12 or PS7XX to a high of $3,000 on a Power 795. If you are peddling an IBM i solution, then the extra rebate ranges from a low of $1,200 on those blades to a high of $4,500 on the big bad box. If you are peddling solutions running on the Linux-only PowerLinux 7R1 or 7R2 rack servers, then IBM Europe will spot you an extra $500 rebate.