IBM offers managed services at customer premises

IDG News Service - IBM today launched a service designed to manage Web servers that are located at customers' premises. As part of the offering, called Services Anywhere, IBM will remotely deliver a variety of managed security, monitoring and storage services.
These types of managed services are most often offered to companies that keep their Web servers hosted externally at the location of the service provider. Services Anywhere is aimed at companies that are interested in the services but want to keep their servers on their own premises or have their servers located externally in rented space at so-called co-location centers and don't want to move them, said Stuart Bean, director of e-business hosting at IBM Global Services.
When it started sensing demand for something like this late last year, IBM decided to offer Services Anywhere as an alternative to its more encompassing and fully managed hosting offerings, which involve having the customers' systems at IBM facilities, Bean said. About five or six companies have already signed up for Services Anywhere, Bean said.
"We feel it's a good win-win option for clients caught in the middle," interested in the services but not in moving out the servers, he said.
Services Anywhere is aimed at companies with an installed base of between 30 and 1,000 Web servers, Bean said. To provide the services remotely, IBM will build a remote operations console at the customer's site that links the servers and IBM's central management facility via a virtual private network connection.
Services Anywhere is available now in the U.S., Canada and Latin America and will be available in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region next month, Bean said. Prices for the service vary, but a ballpark figure is around $25,000 per month, he said.
Analysts said IBM would rather stick to its more traditional hosting services, in which it manages customers' Web servers in its own facilities, but they added that customer demand has forced IBM to launch this service.
"If IBM had its druthers, it would never do it this way," said Melanie Posey, an analyst at Framingham, Mass.-based IDC.
IBM has had the capability to offer this middle-of-the-road service for some time and is now packaging and marketing it, analysts said.
"IBM has put together this package to let customers know IBM isn't forcing them into the IBM data center," IDC analyst David Tapper said. "It's an IBM response to customer demand and concerns."
Demand is coming from customers that had their Web servers hosted off-site only to have to bring them back in-house after