IBM Gets EMEA Integrators And ISVs To Push Power Systems

January 20, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

IBM’s Europe, Middle East, and Africa operations wants to peddle more Power iron, and it is working with the reseller and software application vendor community to give business partners and systems integrators a piece of the action if they work with solution providers to close deals.

Specifically, in announcement letter ZA14-1004, the 2014 Power ISV Solution Connection Program is giving said business partner and system integrator companies rebates that range from $500 to $3,000. Here is what the rebate schedule looks like:

As you can see, the bigger the box, the bigger the rebate. Moreover, you will notice that IBM is giving a bit more rebate action to those partners and ISVs who work together to push Power and Linux combinations. Those sweetened rebates for Linux are available for regular Power Systems and Flex p-class nodes machines as well as for the PowerLinux machines, which are reduced-priced Power systems that are only able to boot Red Hat Enterprise Linux or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. (Meaning they cannot boot AIX or IBM i.) Even though this is a European deal, the rebates are calculated in US dollars.

The business partner and system integrators have to do paperwork outlining the marketing plan between themselves and ISVs to get the rebates, and the relationships between the solution providers and ISVs do not have to be exclusive. The Power Systems channel manager in each country has the final say over whether a deal meets IBM’s criteria or not. The deal tops out at five systems per unique customer account. IBM also expects for deals involving IBM i-based high availability software to have a Capacity BackUp (CBU) configuration of a Power Systems machine in the deal. (In this case, the Power7-based Power 720, 740, or 750 or the BladeCenter or PureFlex nodes sporting Power7 chips.)

This deal runs until December 31, 2014. As far as I can tell, there is not a similar deal in effect in the United States, Canada, or Asia. But that statement is only as good as the search engine on IBM’s website.