2. B2B Assignment IBM’s B2B segments
Q: Explore IBM’s Web site: http://www.ibm.com. Look at different sections / links of the
site targeted to different kinds of IBM customers. List down the different b2b segments
they are targeting. What are the various bases, according to you, on which they have
segmented the market? Taking any 5 examples of their customer segment / solutions, tell
which of their products/ services will be relevant to which target segments.
A: IBM provides wide range of Hardware/Software products and services to a large number of
businesses across the globe. List of customer segments IBM is targeting is as follows:
• Large Enterprises
• Growing Businesses
• Mid-Sized Businesses
• Public Sector Enterprises
• Various Industries like Banking, Automotive, and Construction Financial Markets etc.
VARIOUS BASES ON WHICH THEY HAVE SEGMENTED THE MARKET:
1) By Product or services: Product wise divisions are software, hardware and Services.
Various examples include End user services, Integrated Communication services, IT
strategy and Architecture services, Maintenance and Technical support services,
middleware services, Semiconductor devices etc.
2) By Industry: IBM software products and services are customized according to the
different requirements of the various Industries. Some of the Industries are given as
follows:
• Banking
• Automotive
• Construction
• Financial Markets
• Aerospace and Defense
• Consumer Products
• Chemical and Petroleum
• Education
• Electronics
• Healthcare
• Insurance
• Media and Entertainment
3) By Size of the customer’s firm
• Very Small Businesses (Less than 50 employees)
• Small Businesses (50-100 Employees)
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3. B2B Assignment IBM’s B2B segments
• Mid-Size business (100-1000 employees)
• Large Enterprises (More than 1000 employees)
• Growing Companies
4) By Business needs (Behavioral segmentation)
• Business Intelligence
• Enterprise resource planning
• Product lifecycle management
• Sensors
• Security
5) By Technology used by customers
• Cloud Computing
• Operating Systems
• Networking Solutions
6) By IT Issue
• Business Process Management
• Collaboration
• Content Management
• Cost Management
• Data Management
• Disaster Recovery
• Distribution Management
7) By business partner
• IBM and Cisco
• IBM and Dessaults systems
• IBM and Oracle
• IBM and SAP
8) Customer capabilities
• Outsourcing Services
• Business Process Outsourcing
• Application Services
• Applications on Demand
• IT Outsourcing and Hosting
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4. B2B Assignment IBM’s B2B segments
9) By Usage situations
• Hospital Information Management System
• HospiLogix – 3.5
• iPACS
EXAMPLES OF THEIR CUSTOMER SEGMENT / SOLUTIONS
1) Informix: IBM information Management Software for Small and Medium
Businesses
IBM Information Management softwarehelp small or midsize companies manage data and
connect people and systems for better business results. Our proven solutions enable them to
integrate disparate data from multiple systems to improve your company productivity, agility,
and innovation, and boost bottom line.
IBM Informix is the only continuously available, easily embeddable, OLTP database software
that reduces costs and increases productivity by providing near-zero administration for small to
highly-distributed environments regardless of platform.
Advantages of Informix
Hassle free data management: self-monitoring and self-healing features built in can also be
customized to proactively track and react to your business thresholds – and resolve them before
they become an issue.
Agility to manage data growth: using the latest compression technology customers are able to
keep their data storage costs low, and with automatic workload balancing across Informix
clusters can easily scale to react to growing business volumes.
Reliability for business continuity:Offering flexible replication and redundancy choices that
provide built-in business continuity where in the case of a system failure, another server
automatically takes over with no impact to your business.
2) Datacenter resource managementfor financial services and companies with large in-
house data centers:
Datacenter resource management solutions so powerful you can boost performance, increase
your density, reduce cooling tonnage by half and cut total cost of ownership (TCO).
By automating your inventory and asset management processes you can improve data center
asset visibility, streamline inventory and enhance reporting. IBM's data center resource
management solutions employ sensor technology to help you track IT assets within, or moving in
and out of your data center, without direct line-of-site requirements. It can help you reduce lost
or missing mobile and production assets, as well as increase service level agreements
management, through improved maintainability of your IT assets.
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5. B2B Assignment IBM’s B2B segments
3) Industrial tracking and visibility solutions for automotive, industrial
manufacturing, and aerospace & defense companies
Improve inventory visibility. Coordinate with suppliers. And streamline industrial production
operations. By increasing measurability and visibility through your procurement, production and
supply chain processes, you can reduce costs while getting your products to market more
quickly. Radio frequency identification (RFID) solutions can transform the way you do business
and differentiate your manufacturing company in today's competitive marketplace.
4) IBM Cognos BI and planning solutions help small and midsize businesses to:
• Manage costs and improve efficiency by providing consistent, reliable information
throughout the company
• Find new opportunities and trends through self-service analysis
• Deliver better customer service with improved insight into customers gained through
accurate reporting
• Drive profitability and revenue growth by optimizing and transforming a business with
integrated planning, analysis and reporting
• Take quick corrective action by easily modifying plans, forecasts and budgets, and by
creating new "what if" business scenarios
• Be more productive immediately with a preconfigured BI and planning solution purpose-
built for midsize companies
5) Business analytics for telecommunications:
IBM Business Analytics software delivers complete, consistent and accurate information those
decision-makers in telecommunications companies trust to improve business performance.
Advantages:
Predict and prevent subscriber churn—while attracting new customers
• Develop predictive intelligence and performance dashboards
• Align business processes around a common view of the most influential customers
• Build longer-lasting—and more profitable—relationships with subscribers
Leverage dashboards and scorecards
• Present a unified view of revenues and expenses
• Analyze marketing budgets at the department, project or regional expense level
• Know where you stand against plan with clear, concise and accurate information
Optimize customer service with dashboards and alerts
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6. B2B Assignment IBM’s B2B segments
• Measure and analyze key metrics to improve business operations
• Gain simultaneous line-of-sight visibility across a vast array of correlated metrics
• View metrics and monitor up-to-the-moment call trends and dynamics, agent
performance and SLA performance
Analyze cross-platform advertising performance
• Efficiently measure advertising results so you can document the value of your network to
advertising agencies and enterprise customers
• Predict consumer response to advertising across channels
• Measure actual performance against predictions—as it occurs
Improve asset utilization and optimize related labor costs
• Monitor the health and productivity of your infrastructure equipment
• Centrally view scorecards and dashboard with detailed information culled from multiple
business applications
MORE EXAMPLES:
For Insurance
Products
• Cognos Information Management solutions for insurance
• Enterprise content management solutions for insurance
• Rational software solutions for insurance
• System Storage information infrastructure solutions for financial services
• Tivoli software service management solutions for financial services
• WebSphere Portal solutions for insurance
Services
• IT services for insurance
For Financial markets
Products
• Cognos Information Management solutions for banking
• Rational software solutions for banking
• System Storage information infrastructure solutions for financial services
• Tivoli software service management solutions for financial services
• WebSphere Portal solutions for banking
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7. B2B Assignment IBM’s B2B segments
Services
• IT services for financial markets
For Automotive:
Products
• Integrated Product Management solutions for PLM
• Rational automotive industry solutions
• Cognos solutions for manufacturing
• Cognos solutions for supply chain
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