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Online with Mainline: Q&A with one of IBM's biggest solution providers


IBM recently sat down with Chris Minnis, a Systems Engineer and the IBM System x™ Team Lead at Mainline Information Systems, to talk about x86 migration trends, the competitive landscape and life at one of the top IBM solution providers.



IBM: Mainline deals only in IBM products—why is that?
MINNIS: It's been that way since the company started in 1989. We believe IBM has the strongest products on the market, and the best engineering team behind product design and development. To make the most of our relationship, we’ve aligned our technical teams with IBM, and we've developed one of the strongest IT sales teams in the country. We believe—and think our customers believe—that IBM has the best products today and is committed to delivering the best products for our business needs tomorrow. As a result, in 2005, Mainline had over $520 million in revenue.

IBM: And how is the competition looking?
MINNIS: It's an interesting field right now. We don't see Dell as a primary competitor anymore, mainly because they're just not focused on delivering solutions. HP is solutions-focused, but IBM has a lot of opportunity there because of the willingness to collaborate with customers and IBM Business Partners to solve problems.

As far as Sun, we are starting to see more customers moving from Solaris to Linux®, and what we're finding is that the migration to IBM hardware is not nearly as complicated as we thought it would be. It's definitely an emerging opportunity, and we've already started hiring for expertise in that area.

IBM: Itanium is still generating some buzz. What are you seeing on the ground?
MINNIS: We think only a very small percentage of companies are actually using Intel® Itanium®. In the last calendar year, my team has called on at least 100 medium to large competitive opportunities across the country, and we've had only five accounts that have Itanium on the floor. Four of those ended up replacing their HP systems with IBM, specifically with System x3950.

IBM: How is the x86 landscape changing overall?
MINNIS: Virtualization has changed everything in the last couple of years. Let me give you an example. We have a banking customer in the southeast who was loyal to Dell, then they acquired another bank that was loyal to HP. The C-level IT managers were vendor neutral—they just wanted to solve the problem. IBM had the storage platform, so we were invited in to talk. We did a server consolidation study with IBM using CDAT [Consolidation Design and Analysis Toolset]. We recommended IBM BladeCenter® with virtualization on VMware as a solution, and they snapped it up. They were able to consolidate 800 servers onto 6 BladeCenter chassis, allowing them to close an entire data center. The benefits were huge—significant savings in power and cooling, better manageability. And the virtualization architecture gives them the flexibility to handle future acquisitions.

IBM: What about virtual client solutions?
MINNIS: Client virtualization is definitely an emerging trend. It's a natural next step for customers to focus on migrating to server-based clients after server consolidation. Mainline has created a Virtual Client Solutions (VCS) team— aligned with IBM—to create solutions that are customized for customers' unique needs. I believe we are the go-to IBM Business Partner for VCS due to our skill and experience in the area. We have seen data security and compliance as the issues most often driving virtual client efforts, but Mainline has found there can be significant power and cooling savings as well.

IBM: Any other big migration wins that you are especially proud of?
MINNIS: Absolutely! Our biggest competitive win this year was with a large insurance company based in the northeast. In 2004 they deployed a suite of customized CRM applications, and the software vendor mandated that the hardware be Itanium on HP. But in Q1 of 2006, they started having performance and scalability issues. They were a very strategic HP shop, but they gave us a window of opportunity. We brought in a dual-core System x3950 for them to benchmark, and it turned out to be 15 percent faster. Plus they saw a significant pricing advantage with IBM. They'd been HP-loyal for five years, but now they're one of our top five accounts. They've spent over $6 million in System x so far.

IBM: What do you see as IBM's strength in the x86 market?
MINNIS: Well, one thing we've found, especially in competitive situations, is that the other big vendors are oftentimes less willing to come in and consolidate what I would call an annuity account—a company that buys individual rack-mount servers every three to five years. So where a solution like server consolidation and virtualization would save that customer money, some of IBM's competitors have not been as willing to come in and invest time on behalf of the customer in an effort to provide a solution that actually saves money. They're more interested in their bottom line. I've always found it to be a situation unique to IBM and by proxy unique to Mainline in that, as a pair, we're dedicated to saving the customer money and doing things in the best way.

For more information
For more information about IBM System x, visit our Web site at ibm.com/systems/x.
For more information about IBM BladeCenter, visit our Web site at ibm.com/systems/bladecenter.
For more information about Mainline Information Systems, visit: www.mainline.com. You can contact Chris Minnis at Chris.Minnis@mainline.com.

© Copyright IBM Corporation 2006
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Produced in the United States of America
October 2006
All Rights Reserved

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