The rumors of Lenovo buying out IBM's x86 server line have been around for a while now, but this article raises an interesting point.
Suppose Microsoft per$uades Lenovo to bundle Small Business Server 2008 or Essential Business Server 2008 with the ex-IBM Thinkservers. That's still not going to match a Foundations appliance on 'bang-for-your-back' but the image of SBS teaming with an 'IBM' brand and the resulting bundle competing with Foundations might be a bit embarrassing for IBM.
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2 comments:
Hi Graham,
I wouldn't call Lenovo an IBM brand. Microsoft SBS has a huge installed based so it would be stupid for any hardware vendor in the SMB space to let it slip. While you could argue that selling a competitors product is a bad idea most IBM Business Partners are also Microsoft Partners. There are IBM Partners that offer Exchange migration tools or some vague application migration magic.
At the end I think you just have to be better and be able to get this message into the market.
Hi Henning,
I wasn't referring to 'Lenovo' as the IBM brand. I was thinking of the historic IBM hardware product ranges from Thinkpad to (who knows?) X-Series all going out as psuedo-appliances under a Microsoft marketing campaign. I know and accept that IBM hardware division will sell servers to anyone (and I don't blame them for that) but if/once the product range transfers to Lenovo there is no IBM control over the subsequent Lenovo advertising eg.
"ThinkServer and SBS and Sharepoint - the Perfect Combination"
/Graham
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