IBM Marks One-Year Anniversary of Gluecode Acquisition With New Open Source Partner Initiative

May 18, 2006; 05:08 AM
Marking the one-year anniversary of IBM acquiring Gluecode and throwing its support behind the Apache Geronimo project, IBM announced a partner initiative for IBM WebSphere Application Server (WAS) Community Edition, IBM's open source application server. The new initiative is aimed at helping business partners reduce costs and grow revenue when supporting open source technologies.

IBM is providing partners with free sales, marketing and technical support to use WAS Community Edition to provide departmental and small and medium sized customers with an open source foundation for a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) that can scale to meet business needs. Based on core open source technology from the Apache Geronimo application server, WAS Community Edition and related subscription support services provide a flexible and affordable infrastructure software to organizations that need a reliable alternative to traditional commercial software offerings.

"Open source customers select WAS Community Edition as a way of reducing their open source integration costs while receiving rock-solid world-class support from IBM," said Buell Duncan, General Manager, ISV and Developer Relations, IBM. "With IBM's unmatched technical, sales and marketing support capabilities, this initiative can help ISVs and SIs who use open source realize the same cost savings and generate more revenue in the process."

WAS Community Edition, which is free to download and use, is pre-integrated with Apache Tomcat and several most commonly used open source components, such as web services, security, authentication, messaging, and web tier clustering.

Partners now have access to the IBM Virtual Innovation Center where they can obtain free personalized WAS Community Edition technical enablement assistance, including technical education, one-on-one access to IBM IT architects, and access to any of the IBM Innovation Centers for testing their solutions. Launched in 2004, the IBM Virtual Innovation Center give developers instant access to IBM's hardware and software portfolio within a period of two hours, instead of several weeks, so they can build new skills and solutions from their desktops in half the amount of time and at one tenth of the cost.

To help partners increase revenue from their open source based solutions, IBM Sales Connection provides instant access to WAS Community Edition sales specialists who can help the partners close deals faster. Moreover, the initiative provides help to speed the deployment and eliminate risks of proof of concept projects through an offer of 90 days of free WAS CE Elite level support, around the clock, around the world.

IBM is also offering qualified partners a choice of three lead generation packages worth up to $12,000, free of charge. Those are available through the IBM PartnerWorld Industry Networks and include a Web-based lead generation package with listing in IBM's business partner application showcase and assistance to help qualify leads; telemarketing support for hundreds of calls to potential customers and joint, hosted events with qualified prospects.

One partner that has already experienced the benefits of WAS Community Edition is Enigma, a provider of software that improves the profitability of the installation, operation and maintenance of complex equipment. Responding to their customers desire to use an open source application server backed by enterprise class support services, Enigma was able to port their application to WAS Community Edition in less than two weeks.

"Enigma is committed to providing a complete aftermarket solution that improves the maintenance productivity, parts logistics, and equipment uptime of our customers. Enigma's customers demand a cost-effective solution that can be rapidly deployed and can expand to meet future aftermarket business needs. By migrating Enigma 3C to WAS Community Edition, we were able to provide the quality and scale our customers demand, and broaden our support of the IBM WebSphere portfolio," said Jonathan Yaron, CEO and President, Enigma Inc.