Some More Wheeling And Dealing On Power Systems, Networking

July 15, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

My intuition keeps telling me that IBM should be doing something dramatic in terms of packaging or pricing or promotions to try to boost sales of Power Systems, but Big Blue keeps on keeping on, as if there is nothing it can do to stop the slide in sales of Power-based servers it has experienced in the past several months.

Instead, IBM keeps doing little itty bitty deals that save a few pennies on the dollar for customers who are upgrading their systems. The dealing seems to be most intense outside of the United States and Canada, and the most recent deals to come out of the company that affect Power Systems shops are no different.

A deal that ran out at the end of the quarter in Australia has been extended to the end of the third quarter in announcement letter A313-063A. If you bought a machine from July 1 through July 7, you were not able to take the deal, but if you make a fuss, IBM will probably honor it just the same. Anyway, under the Power Systems Upgrade Your Platform, Up-Skill Your Team promotion, customers Down Under who buy specific machines through reseller partners are eligible for up to two slots in Systems and Technology training courses, which have a market value in Australian dollars that ranges from $2,200 to $4,500. Alternatively, you can use the training vouchers that come through the deal to attend the 2013 Technical Symposium in Melbourne on August 20.

Here are the machines that you can buy and get the freebie training:

IBM warns that it has only made a set amount of funding available for this promotion (without saying how much) and that it will be available on a first-come, first-served basis.

The next deal that IBM did last week is available in Europe, and it relates to switches, not Power Systems. But these are the kind of switches that are often used in conjunction with rack-based Power Systems iron.

In announcement letter ZA13-1106, customers can get a rebate worth up to $2,400 if they replace a non-IBM switch with an IBM switch. The deal can be used to replace switches from Cisco Systems, Juniper Networks, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel Networks (where Blade Network Technology, the basis of IBM’s networking business, was spun out of), Enterasys, Extreme Networks, Arista Networks, Brocade Communications, Dell, and Mellanox Technologies. This rebate deal also covers the replacement of older IBM switches if you happen to have them in your own shop. The replaced switches have to have at least 24 ports, they have to work, and IBM takes possession of them.

Here the list of IBM gear you can buy and the rebate you get for each device: