IBM deems mid-market as potential growth niche

Eyeing 70% business opportunity, IBM Philippines is aligning strategies this year to penetrate the small and medium businesses or the mid-market unit in the country.

Perceived to be a very important niche market, IBM in a press conference recently announced their significant expansion of its new and advanced Express Advantage program for the mid-sized enterprises.

The Express Advantage combines a comprehensive set of mid-market offerings, business partner resources and customer capabilities to create a unified, end-to-end approach helping SMBs innovate and grow.

According to ibm.com’s Country Manager Erwin Chuansu in his presentation, SMBs create 75% new jobs in the US while 25 million SMEs accounts for two-thirds or almost 66% in European employment and about three-quarters in Asia Pacific.

To IBM, SMB is a significant market opportunity amounting to over $330B that would account for 11% growth in its solutions. It has become the fastest growing sector generating 20% of IBM revenue 50% of which revenue comes through IBM Business Partners that drives collaboration innovation with customers.

In the Philippines, IBM eyes this market as it represents 70% of core business that would amount to about $400M opportunity (without PCs) and is continually growing at 12.3% rate.

Chuansu said that this year IBM focuses and aims to capture opportunity in emerging markets the reason of which they are targeting the SMBs, accelerate business solutions, improving their global territory model which is to leverage all IBM operations worldwide, and through extending Express Advantage.

In a recent survey conducted where IBM polled 1, 200 mid-market firms around the world in various industries, it was found out that nearly two out of three businesses plans to make changes in their business model over the next two years in order to better compete and drive expansion.

Seeing the need to fuel this innovation and expansion, IBM with its Express Advantage initiative enables the delivery of results to mid-sized companies allowing them to drive business and over-all market growth. These newest offerings in ASEAN include several new products.

Nic Nuske of ibm.com’s Manager for Asia Pacific said that, “we want to establish a very strong presence in the Philippines by making sure that the market would know that IBM is approachable, affordable and accessible. We also want to gain more market share and grow in Cebu as well.” – Rhia de Pablo