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Big Blue unveils new Express Portfolio offerings
'It's all SME, SME, SME'

By Dawn Kawamoto

Published: Monday 10 October 2005

IBM is set to announce nearly two dozen new offerings for small and medium-size businesses, as part of its Express Portfolio.

Big Blue will unveil 22 new products and services, marking the single largest rollout in its three-year-old Express Portfolio line-up. For IBM, the small and medium business, or SME, arena is worth trolling, given its estimated $360bn market size.

Elaine Case, director of IBM's small and medium business unit, said: "The SM[E] market has hundreds of thousands of customers, a high growth rate and special needs."

IBM's new Express Portfolio offerings will include RFID managed services for retailers, medical imaging storage for healthcare companies and online backup and email recovery.

Case said: "RFID managed services has been available for enterprise customers, and now SM[E] customers will have access. They can convert barcodes to RFID."

The IBM Express RFID Services 'slap and ship' managed services will cost $830 per month under a three-year contract.

Approximately 70 per cent of the new product offerings are in the managed services area, because SME customers often cannot afford to purchase the hardware and software or don't have a desire to operate it, Case noted.

The Express Portfolio now encompasses more than 120 products and services, with the addition of the 22 new offerings.

Case noted that the Express Portfolio was developed with a certain set of criteria which products and services had to meet in order to be included. As a result, a number of IBM's existing offerings which catered to corporate customers did not fit the bill and often could not be retooled to serve the SME market.

Case added: "There was a realisation that we, and the industry, were underserving the SM[E] market."

Dawn Kawamoto writes for CNET News.com