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Viewing the software-as-a-service market as a major new-growth industry, IBM is offering a package of services and incentives to help software companies and channel partners deploy their products as hosted applications.
Software developers that want to deliver their applications as on-demand services can obtain access to IBM technical architects, take online training courses and obtain sales incentives to make the transition to SAAS.
IBM contends it has been out of the application software business since 1999, and that puts it in a prime position to partner with many different ISVs that want to deploy their products as services, said Scott Hebner, IBMs vice president for software strategy and strategic partners.
SAAS is a major opportunity for IBM because “we are not only a provider of hardware and software, but we are also the worlds biggest provider of hosted capabilities,” Hebner said. Both enterprise business customers and the software providers themselves want to outsource business processes and the IT resources required to deliver them, he noted.
Hebner also contends that, by now, most companies are already comfortable with the basic concept of IT outsourcing. “A majority of customers have outsourced some of the more straightforward services like payroll. And companies like ADP [Automatic Data Processing] have made a big business out of helping customers manage their payroll, and the customers have outsourced it to them,” Hebner noted.