IBM Express-es Its Candid Desire For SMEs
Part Two: Market Impact
P.J. Jakovljevic - August 5, 2003

Market Impact

Despite its prominence in the upper-end of the market, IBM Corporation (NYSE: IBM) is hardly an alien in the mid-market and in the application space alike, given it had developed and it used to own possibly the first full-fledged ERP system, MAPICS, a progenitor of today's MAPICS ERP for iSeries product. Having subsequently spun off MAPICS nearly three decades ago, IBM had long relinquished the in-house applications development per se. However, through a number of partnerships with dozens of applications ISVs, SAP, J.D. Edwards, Geac, SSA GT, QAD, MAPICS, Intentia, Adonix, PeopleSoft, to name only some, and many of which have traditionally been mid-market incumbents, IBM should feel entitled to this market. Also, owing to the once highly successful AS/400 hardware platform (now branded iSeries), IBM has quite a high brand awareness in certain sectors, and, more importantly, brand preference due to the platform's proverbial immaculate performance and reliability. However, price and the need for specially trained RPG development language administrators that are not that ubiquitous in the market like Microsoft Visual Basic (VB) programmers, have never boded well for IBM's massive acceptance within the space. Not to mention Microsoft's undisputed supremacy on desktops...