IBM’s latest forays into the SMB market are really interesting to watch. “If IBM seems too big for your mid-sized business … call 1-877-IBM-ACCESS to resize us,” reads their online storefront today. It’s clear that they are making a very concerted effort to dispel the notion that IBM is for large enterprises / deep pockets only. In yesterday’s announcement of three new SMB offerings, the third was the latest “Grid and Grow Express” release.“IBM Grid and Grow Express — a complete package, including hardware, software and services, that enables first-time customers to take advantage of grid technology. The offering consists of BladeCenter with seven blades, along with a choice of server architectures, operating systems, schedulers and services that tie these technologies together. This package positions SMBs for future growth, as well as provides the technology to address business challenges associated with mission critical, compute-intensive applications. Available at $1,369 per month for a 36 month term. Available in the US, the UK, Canada, Germany, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Israel, Turkey, and Luxembourg.” So it sounds like the equivalent of leasing a car. You get all the hardware and middleware to start running a Grid in your SMB environment — without having to build it from scratch yourself, and presumably with IBM services to help you out if you screw anything up. At $1,369 per month over three years, you’re paying $50,000 for the use of 7 blade servers and the accompanying job schedulers and middleware. If you bought 7 SUSE Linux enterprise blades from Novell at $899 apiece, you could run Altair’s OpenPBS for free, use the Globus Toolkit as the middleware for free, and be ahead >$40k.However, how much time would your sys admin(s) spend on the home grown open source Grid if they went that route? Over three years — probably more than $40k.So IBM has packaged up something that does seem to make economic sense for SMBs … and there’s no question that there are plenty of mid-market customers that need the performance of Grid, but want to avoid cobbling together everything on their own. According to IDG News’ China Martens, who broke the story on Grid and Grow Express yesterday:“Sanjeev Aggarwal, senior analyst for Yankee Group’s SMB strategies decision service, described the pricing as “very aggressive” and likely to appeal to SMBs weighing the cost of buying additional PCs versus moving to share high-performance computing resources via grid technology. ‘There’s definitely an interest [in grid] among midmarket verticals including education and pharmaceuticals,’ he said.”Expect other vendors to come out with similar bundled Grid solutions on lease programs … we’re going to see some interesting price models and competition as the big iron guys keep duking it out for mid-market revenues. Technology Industry