IBM signing 200 Microsoft Partners per month

Michael Vizard from Channel Insider highlights steps IBM is taking to capitalize on Microsoft miscues with Vista and channel providers.  With all the hype and marketing around Lotus to Exchange migrations its interesting to see how IBM is positioning Lotus Foundations as the silver bullet of self-healing.   Vizard:

IBM is claiming that it is now signing up roughly 200 Microsoft partners a month to sell the latest iteration of the Notes franchise, which today is called Lotus Foundations. The opportunity that IBM is trying to exploit is twofold. The first concerns missteps made by Microsoft that has left partners with nothing to sell while they wait for Windows 7 and the arrival of Microsoft Exchange 2010. Customers have summarily rejected Windows Vista, which leaves little opportunity to sell a Microsoft Office upgrade. And nobody really wants to upgrade their messaging platform when they all know that Microsoft Exchange 2010 will be out sometime in the next six months. Taken together, this creates a window of opportunity for IBM to at least get a hearing about selling Lotus Foundations on top of a new self-managing Linux server implementation.

The self-managing capability of Lotus Foundations is cornerstone on which IBM is resting the second element of it renewed offensive against Microsoft. Lotus Foundations is based on Linux server technology that IBM picked up when it acquired Net Integration Technologies (Netix) in early 2008. Netix built a Linux distribution that came integrated with a host of autonomic tools that made the platform self-healing. Any time there is a problem with the server, the entire system just reboots itself and restores all the original settings automatically. Similarly, every time a patch is delivered, the system reboots a whole new instance of the operating system, versus trying to layer in a patch on top of a running application.

Lotus Foundations Screenshot