Arrow ECS IBM Group Newsletter

New Cloud Enablement Training in June

Do you need to raise your understanding of cloud computing in order to effectively position its business value? Online attendance at either The Cloud’s Business Imperatives or The Cloud’s Security Essentials will more than prepare you for whatever cloud issues come your way. In addition, these classes will help you to establish yourself as an authority in facilitating successful, secure and profitable relationships among organizations and cloud service providers. Remember, vouchers can be used for these classes, but space is limited. Email fusion@arrow.com for pricing information.

Distributor Only Tivoli Talk - Industry Strategy and Winning in the Banking Industry

Reminder, tomorrow, Thursday, May 26th at 10 am est, our 2nd Quarter Distributor Only Tivoli Talk series continues with a great topic on IBM's Industry strategy and approach, with a deep dive on the banking industry.  Come learn more about IBM's approach to the Industry and the resources and programs available for you to leverage to help your Partners talk to their clients in their language by understanding their industry related business challenges. 

Title:  Industry Strategy with a focus on winning in the Banking Industry
Date:  May 26th, 2011
Time:  10:00 - 11:00 am est
Speakers:

• Marni Enghauser, Market Segment Manager, Integrated Service Management
• Michael Zelle, Market Segment Manager, Financial Services

IBM System Networking Sales & Technical Training Events in June

IBM System Networking is hosting 13 additional Sales and Technical training events in the US in June.  

We hope that you, and others from your Company, will join us for these events!  

We are hosting IBM System Networking "Fast Start" Sales events:

• June 7 - Columbus, OH and Ft. Lauderdale, FL
• June 8 - Phoenix/Tempe, AZ
• June 9 - Hartford, CT, Raleigh, NC and Minneapolis, MN

Details including dates, times and locations are included in this invitation:

Initiate Master Data Service Technical Enablement Boot Camp

This is a FREE "technical" bootcamp for Partners, VADs and IBMers.  This is not sales training and requires technical skills.  Required skills and pre-requisites are listed below and in the attached agenda.

About Initiate:
Initiate MDS is the tip of the spear for IBM Healthcare, Life Sciences, Insurance, Government and other industry information management solutions.  Our EMPI software offering for Patient, Provider and Payer solutions is the recognized leader in accuracy, scalability, speed and customer deployments according to leading analyst reports from Gartner, Forrester, JD Power KLAS and others.

Combined software and services business is typically in the $800K - $1M+ range for initial implementations, with numerous potential for additional cross-sell and up-sell solutions to the same client in the future.

A MUST for all customers using ESXi/ESX 3.5

Attention System x Partners!   If you are working with a customer that is still using ESXi/ESX 3.5 and has not applied the appropriate patch listed below for their environment, recommend that they install this patch:
•    ESXi ESXe350-201012401-I-BG
•    ESX ESX350-201012410-BG

This patch MUST be installed to continue patching hosts after June 1st. The patch updates the secure key.

You can find more information about the patch, and how to apply it, in these article:
•   For ESXi, see 1030002.
•   For ESX, see 1030001.

If you have any questions, please email xseriesprograms@arrow.com.

JOIN US AT MAY DAYS for a ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION....

The Automation space is a mature but growing space, with opportunities that run the gamut from SMBs to Fortune 500 enterprises. It offers extensive opportunities for displacement sales, adjacency sales and add-on sales, as well as greenfield opportunities with mid-market accounts.  We are especially excited about the enhancement to our portfolio through the recent BigFix acquisition.  

Please join Ray Petruch, BUE, WW Tivoli Channel Sales - Automation, for a lunchtime round table discussion at Arrow May days, Tuesday, May 24th at 12 PM to learn more about IBM's Automation Portfolio strategy, and to learn how your company can participate and profit in the Business Automation and Performance Automation market segments.  Logistics will be sent to you once you register for the roundtable. Registration is limited, so register today!

Click here to register by Friday, May 20th.
 
See you in TEXAS!!

Upcoming Tivoli Talk on a TSM Pricing Bundle - May 31

Team, thank you for those who joined us on last Thursday's Distributor Only Tivoli Talk on the IBM Security Framework with a focus on Virtualization, featuring our industry leading product - Virtual Server Protection.  We hope you found the call to be informative.  Please check out the possible next steps you can take in the Security and Virtualization area and do not miss the upcoming Storage Tivoli Talk on May 31st on the new TSM pricing bundle (see details below).

Here are some actions you can take:
1.  If you were unable to attend the call - please check out the replay or at least look through the presentation material (find the mp3 and powerpoint under the "additional details" section at the link below).  Click here for the link to the replay and the presentation material.

Spotlight - May 16, 2011

Power Systems
Cloud outages are going to happen. They're a reality, and if you can't stand the outage, get out of the cloud, many solution providers said.  Click here to take a look at 10 recent cloud outages and what caused them.

System x/Blade
Power up with the Q2 System x UPS Sales Incentive!  Arrow ECS US business partners selling IBM System x can earn a $15 back end rebate for each eligible UPS unit sold .  Click here for a list of attached qualifying products!    Read more... 

Storage
Arrow recently announced our latest remote demo program around virtualization.  Schedule a remote demo from our state of the art solution center for XIV, V7000, SVC or N series and earn marketing dollars for subsequent customer activities like a sporting event or nice dinner. Seeing is believing and this is a wonderful opportunity to show your customers these products in action. 

Download Arrow Storage Virtualization Remote Demo Program

 

Software
Last year Pulse Comes to You brought the experience and excitement of the global Pulse event to over 7,300 client attendees at 71 PCTY events worldwide and generated over $488 Million of validated leads.

IBM is now making these exciting events available to our Business Partners to host in 2011 and beyond!  Read more...

Retail
IBM Retail Store Solutions 2011 Jump Start Co-marketing Incentive!  Approval to conduct an IBM PartnerWorld co-funded marketing activity is contingent upon adherence to the following terms and conditions, which apply in addition to the terms and conditions governing the Business Partner’s PartnerWorld membership.  Read more...

Financing
Put the time value of money to work for your clients by encouraging them to take advantage of IBM’s multiyear contracts and prepayment options. Packaging the multiyear discounts with IBM Global Financing (IGF) can significantly reduce your clients’ total cash outlay for post warranty hardware and software.  Download IBM EasyPay - BP Flyer

Education/Events
Mark Your Calendars for May Days 2011.  Our 15th Annual May Days International Partner Conference is around the corner (May 23-26).Take advantage of this offering to help you get your Storage and Power Certifications, as well as additional education for executives, on solutions, system x services, softwrae, general education and enablement, and much more!   For registration and more info...

 

Storage Announcement Call - MAY 12th 11 AM

IBMers and Business Partners are invited to join this strategic call to learn about the game changing Storage Leadership Initiative outlined in Channel Communication Letter CC1104-127 (see below). Be sure to tell your Partners about this important event.

Call Time: 11am to Noon ET. No registration required. You are encouraged to dial in 10 minutes early as we expect a large number of participants
Dial in:  (800)-475-4945 or (773)-799-3307. Audio passcode: STORAGE.
Charts will be available on the day of the call on PartnerWorld.

Distributor Only Tivoli Talk - Virtual Server Protection - Thursday, May12

I'm excited about out Distributor Only Tivoli Talk coming up this Thursday for two reasons.  

#1 reason I'm excited - Virtualization is a critical topic with all our clients and therefore a great opportunity for all of us.  Here's why clients care and here's why Virtual Server Protection can help you and your BPs drive sales in the virtualization space:

Virtualization has tremendous appeal to many organizations for a variety of reason,  most notably, organizations are successfully reducing capital and operating expenses through server consolidation. By breaking down silos of physical resources, organizations can simplify data center management and reduce server sprawl.  Organizations have additional goals of increased availability, automation and flexibility that are possible only with virtualization. However, in addition to providing these benefits, virtualization significantly impacts security. As data centers evolve into shared and dynamic infrastructures, security concerns increase exponentially.

Virtual infrastructure protection solutions include IBM Security Virtual Server Protection for VMware, an integrated threat miti-gation solution designed to allow organizations to fully exploit the benefits of server virtualization while protecting critical virtualized assets. It provides the same intrusion prevention capabilities of other network IPS solutions, but with the advantage of being integrated into the hypervisor through the VMsafe interface made available by VMware—which means you need to install only one instance for each virtualization server in order to protect the entire virtualized infrastructure.

....and this product is in open Distribution (any BP can sell it) Link to: IBM Virtual Server Security for VMware sales kit

#2 reason I'm excited - Our speaker - Greg Chahalis, Program Director Server and Network Security Strategy and Sales (no pressure Greg):
This guy gets it.  And even better.....he'll help you all get it.  So come and invite your inside and outside sales teams to hear what Greg has to say about Virtualization, security and this really great product that we have in this space - Virtual Server Protection- you'll be glad you did!

Here's the information:
Title:  IBM Security Framework with a focus on Virtualization
Date:  May 12th, 2011
Time:  10:00 - 11:00 am est
Speaker:  Greg Chahalis, Program Director Server and Network Security Strategy and Sales
USA Toll Free #:    888-455-5031
International Toll #   1-312-470-0173

Password: SECURITY
Link to presentation and replay (will be posted the day of the event):
IBMers:  http://w3.tap.ibm.com/medialibrary/media_set_view?id=6660
Business Partners:  https://www-304.ibm.com/partnerworld/wps/servlet/ContentHandler/EPT_SAKH-8F876X/lc=en_US