IBM Wheels And Deals To Sell Power Systems, Storage, and Software

October 12, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Companies are focused on generative AI and how it might be integrated into their applications and their business, but everyone realizes by now that adding GenAI to the systems stack often means needing to upgrade existing back office (transactions) and front office (data analytics) systems so they can feed the AI beast faster and more efficiently. Because there is nothing in the world more expensive than a GPU or an XPU sitting idle when it could be chewing on or spitting out tokens.

To that end, Big Blue is offering a “Buy Now. Pay Later” deal for customers who are shopping for new Power Systems and IBM Storage machines and various IBM Software products. This deal is available for both direct customers as well as through reseller partners, and before you get too excited, this promotion is apparently available only for contracts that are $5 million or larger.

As you might imagine, I think if you are spending close to $100,000 to upgrade to an entry Power S1112 server, you should get the same deal, and ditto for anyone buying any Power11 machine or any storage or any IBM Software group products. Make your arguments with Big Blue or your reseller. If you don’t ask for something, that is a sure way to never get it.

We do not know when this deal started, but we do know that it goes until December 31, 2026. Here are the feeds and speeds:

We are unable to find the IBM announcement letter for this deal, but the chart above shows the basics. IBM is allowing customers to defer any payments for a deal for three months, and after that they carve the deal up into thirds and pay for the deal in months four, seven, and ten. The year term of the financing carries no interest, which is a big deal in the relatively high interest rate environment we are in now.

This deal is available in the United States and Canada and covers software as well as iron, and both perpetual licenses and subscriptions. Technology Lab Services can be part of the deal, but regular hardware and software maintenance cannot be part of that $5 million-plus deal size. (Again, why not?)

If you haven’t bought IBM Storage products before – which I admit seems very unlikely – Big Bleu has a special deal to give business partners an extra 6 percent to 8 percent of margin to close disk, flash, and tape deals. This particular storage deal started on August 7, but if you know about it, then knowledge is not only power, but a bargaining chip with the reseller. You can ask the reseller to share some of the vig. This promotion is available to resellers pushing FlashSystem, Storage Scale, Fusion, and DS8000 arrays. There is a similar deal giving the same incentives to first-time buyers of Power Systems, but the way. In both cases, “new client” means you have not had IBM hardware on active maintenance for the past 12 months.

Finally, for the rest of this year and to help promote takeouts of non-IBM storage gear, Big Blue is offering free data migration services alongside sales of DS800 arrays through December 31, 2026. This deal includes licenses to IBM’s Transparent Data Migration Facility (TDMF) software and techies from Technology Expert Labs to help deal with the migration of data off gear from Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, NetApp, Hitachi Vantara, and others who peddle high-end SAN gear.

This Issue Sponsored By

Table of Contents

Content archive

Recent Posts

Subscribe

Pages

Search