IBM Global Services Partners With NetSolveIBM Global Services Partners With NetSolve

The Memphis City Schools system includes 120,000 students and 175 schools, but its IT budget is small-scale compared with those of the organizations that typically turn to IBM Global Services to manage their networks or applications. But as the world's largest service provider looks downstream for more business, it's beginning to offer small and midsize companies and organizations more flexible pricing on outsourcing services.

IBM Global Services Thursday launched a partnership with NetSolve Inc., a provider of remote network-management services, to extend IBM's ability to deliver managed services to clients who want to pay on a subscription basis. The deal with NetSolve comes just one week after IBM launched a similar partnership with SiteRock Corp., a provider of Web performance-monitoring and management services.

Both deals complement IBM Global Services' initiative to deliver managed services in conjunction with the hosting services it has offered for years. IBM's "E-sourcing" initiative is basically an extension of the service provider's existing hosting and outsourcing services.

Memphis City Schools, the largest school system in Tennessee and the 20th largest in the United States, will be the first to benefit from NetSolve's ProWatch managed network-monitoring application, which will be implemented and hosted by IBM Global Services.

The school has worked with IBM Global Services before, but only on implementation projects. One of them, a three-year project to connect its classrooms and libraries via ATM fiber connectivity, is about to come to an end. With IBM Global Services' help, Memphis City Schools is also rolling out a new administrative wide area network that distributes information such as student enrollment and attendance to 200 individual school LANs. It will pay IBM and NetSolve about $1.8 million annually, spread out over 12 months, to monitor and manage this new network.

"Outsourcing network management was instrumental to building and rolling out our WAN," says Memphis City Schools IT director Linda Mainord. "This has to be up and running by the middle of August, and I have every possible resource including about 122 IT workers tied to this rollout."

Mainord estimates her district will save more than $1 million dollars over the next few years by outsourcing the work to IBM Global Services. Much of this savings will come from renting network-management services from IBM rather than buying management software or hiring people to run the network.

IBM Global Services' move to employ niche service providers such as NetSolve and SiteRock and offer their services via a monthly subscription price indicates its desire to scale down to smaller customers. "Organizations want more options in outsourcing," says Corey Ferengul, a Meta Group senior program director, "other than just turning over the keys to the kingdom."