IBM announced that it was going to kick off a virtualization education and sales initiative designed to bring more small and medium sized businesses into the virtualization fold. IBM said that more than 65 percent of their virtualization sales are driven by IBM partners targeting SMBs, but this program should help expand that number. The new IBM Virtualization Test Drive program is designed to help IBM business partners more easily sell IBM's Virtualization Engine portfolio, a suite of tools designed to help improve efficiency.

While larger companies have typically already started learning about or implementing virtualization solutions in their data centers, small and medium sized businesses are traditionally slower to adopt new technologies because of limited resources and IT budgets. However, virtualization is a key technology to help overcome these limited resources and smaller IT budgets. This program should help educate people on that fact.

The program includes assistance in setting up a center of competence, technical and industry education, sales enablement and support and tools to help IBM Business Partners assist their clients to design and implement virtualization solutions around IBM's Virtualization Engine portfolio. The IBM Business Partners can also provide a "real world" environment in their innovation centers to simulate client scenarios and test applications. By attending training sessions at the IBM Business Partner's Innovation Centers, clients can see that IBM's Virtualization Engine offerings go beyond the abilities of most competitive offerings.

"We see this program strategy as a natural evolution to expand our virtualization ecosystem," said Rich Lechner, vice president, Virtualization, IBM. "We are using this approach to educate our clients on the business benefits of virtualization and demonstrate how easy it is to get started. In conjunction with IBM's extensive sales force, we are enabling our most-qualified business partners to help market offerings that both anticipate and answer our clients' needs while easing entry into the technology and showing immediate results and value."

The IBM Virtualization Test Drive partner program is already seeing impact. "We have found an 80 percent sales success rate when our clients come in to experience solutions first hand, and we have already received sales leads from our first virtualization test drive session." said Anthony Bongiovanni, President, Micro Strategies Inc. "With IBM's new Virtualization Test Drive program, we are helping customers understand the TCO of virtualization technologies as well as use the technology in a risk-free environment."

IBM is expanding Test Drive into Europe and then plans to roll it out to the rest of the world later this year.

Posted by David Marshall on June 24, 2006 11:37 AM