IBM & Motorola Brandish Blades

CHICAGO Supercomm 2004 – IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) announced an agreement with Motorola Computer Group at Supercomm today as part of its ongoing push to sell its blade server technology into the telecom space.

Under the terms of the deal, IBM will deploy specialized software from Motorola on its BladeCenter-T product, which was launched earlier this year for service providers and telecom firms (see IBM's BladeServer Blitz). The deal is also one of the first major partnerships to be unveiled as part of IBM’s eServer Integrated Platform for Telecommunications (IPT), a package of pre-bundled blade server software targeted at the telecom market (see IBM Flashes Its Blade).

Blade servers are big news at the moment. IT managers see them as a high-powered solution to the space constraints experienced in data centers. Analyst firm IDC

estimates that blade servers will represent nearly 29 percent of server unit shipments by the end of 2008.

By creating the IPT strategy, IBM is clearly looking to add momentum to its blade server sales by exploiting telecom firms’ demand for Linux-based applications and industry-specific software on the two-processor BladeCenter-T.

According to Bruce Anthony, chief technology officer of IBM’s telecom servers division, the Motorola software that will now be bundled onto the BladeCenter-T offers “failover in milliseconds.”