IBM packages new products to reduce price point

IBM announced a bunch of new products this week aimed at reducing the cost of ownership for IBM content management and business process management products.

BPM packaging

For starters, IBM has consolidated its BPM portfolio into a single, stream-lined offering. Ken Bisconti, vice president of products and strategy at IBM Enterprise Content Management says this gives customers a better deal. "Historically we have had a collection of products. We made the decision to pull those into a single product," he said. Bisconti says this is a huge value add for existing customers of any single BPM product in the line because they can upgrade to the consolidated set of products at no additional costs. For new customers, he says, the bundle gives them around a 30 percent discount over previous pricing.

Starter packs for small-medium businesses

In addition, IBM released four starter packs which are targeted for smaller or departmental deployments of up to 1400 people (per company). They include starter packs for IBM Content Manager, FileNet Content Manager, BPM and Content Collection (archiving and eDiscovery). They allow clients to purchase just the right number of licenses to meet their current needs, helping them realize a more significant return on investment and enabling them to scale to a full enterprise deployment at any time. Bisconti said that these packages are designed to set up and deploy quickly. He says they have been paying attention to the AIIM survey and the need for faster return on investment.

"The cost-containment pain point has been the number one interest point," Bisconti said. "From a technical perspective, these packages are focused on consumability." What he means by that is they are far easier to install than IBM content management systems have traditionally been in the past.

CMIS is in the house

Finally, IBM announced new versions of IBM Content Manager and IBM FileNet Content Manager will also include a technical preview of the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard. Bisconti said he expects customers and ISVs will be using CMIS to build connectors to other repositories, as well as build front-end applications using products like Lotus Widgets.

It's been a busy week for IBM and Bisconti said to expect some more news next month around eDiscovery. We'll be here to report it as soon as the news is available.

For more information:
- see the IBM press release [1]