IBM announced yesterday a new all-in-one packaged offering to enhance their current cloud based solutions for the enterprise. This is in addition to their existing cloud-based solutions such as IBM SmartCloud for Social Business. Here is a snippet from the announcement
Called IBM Cloud Business Solutions, the portfolio includes multiple components packaged into a single client agreement and delivered “as a service” for speed and simplicity. This includes consulting services, pre-built assets from IBM Research, software, advanced analytics, ongoing support and cloud infrastructure delivered via Softlayer, an IBM company. Pricing is based on a subscription model. Clients pay a set-up fee up front, and then ongoing subscription or usage-based fees.
What is interesting to me here is that this is a “packaged” solution – which includes consulting services to customize the solution based on the needs of the individual customer, analytics driven industry research assets, and industry-specific version for each solution. It is a pay as you use model (with an up-front set up fee) which could considerably reduce the trial costs and help drive adoption. I’d be curious to dig a little deeper into this over the next weeks.
You can find the current list of customizable solutions offered here. A few solutions highlighted in the press release include:
- Care Coordination – With a goal of improving patient outcomes while reducing healthcare costs, this solution enables different stakeholders in a healthcare ecosystem to collaborate across the continuum of care. It integrates the capabilities of care coordination, management, analytics and patient engagement.
- Customer Data – To help clients gain insights and apply them rapidly to business processes, this solution brings together disparate, internal and external data sources to improve marketing operations and planning performance across all channels. By leveraging analytics, clients maximize marketing return on investment.
- Mobile – Mobile initiatives increasingly span enterprises and spur business transformation. This suite of solutions for industries such as banking, retail, healthcare, insurance and travel and transportation provides clients the assets and agility needed to re-imagine and define mobile engagement models with employees, customers and partners. It includes mobile accelerators, mobile designs and development models that support an agile, iterative development process.
- Predictive Maintenance – A lack of visibility into equipment health and inability to accurately forecast downtime results in expensive, unscheduled maintenance. The Predictive Maintenance solution enables a proactive analysis process using equipment and application data to plan, monitor, manage and mitigate equipment failures.
- Smarter Asset Management – Asset management is critical to business operations, but not an area in which business leaders want to invest significant capital. Smarter Asset Management provides clients with minimal resources and low capital investment, optimized for maximum performance.
