IBM reached out to small and medium businesses once again last month by rolling out a broad portfolio of infrastructure software under their IBM Express label. The software in this new portfolio comes from IBM's DB2, Lotus, and Tivoli brands, and they join WebSphere offerings announced last fall. The software has been designed, priced, and marketed specifically to help SMBs integrate and manage their different business processes.

The new IBM offerings are designed to help mid-sized firms address e-business requirements like data management, storage management, collaboration, and messaging. These new products specifically address the needs of SMBs to integrate their different types of operations, such as those for managing finance and accounting, customer relationships, or the supply chain.

Let's get down to it and check out the new IBM Express offerings, which were developed in consultation with Business Partners and configured for them to resell and customize to meet the needs of their customers.

IBM DB2 Express
IBM DB2 Express, a full function database for the mid-market, is designed to offer customers the convenience of being pre-configured by Business Partners for solutions in key vertical markets such as retail, manufacturing, and banking. Business Partners embedding DB2 Express in their offerings can offer customers one or no-click silent, unobtrusive database installation. DB2 Express also provides advanced manageability features through self-tuning and self-configuring characteristics. IBM DB2 Express will run on Linux and Windows and is now available to customers in beta and will be generally available worldwide in the second-quarter of 2003.

IBM Tivoli Storage Resource Manager Express Edition
IBM Tivoli Storage Resource Manager Express Edition, which will also be available in the second quarter, is an open, integrated, and autonomic solution aimed at enabling small- and medium-sized businesses to manage their storage environments to the best of their ability. It's designed for deployment on single processor desktops and should help storage hardware by providing increased capacity utilization, simplified administration, lower costs, and reduced risk of application downtime.