“The ThinkPad brand is second only to the IBM brand”

Michael Nash, AP executive Marketing Execution, Personal Computing Division, IBM Asia-Pacific talks to Prashant L Rao about Big Blue’s ‘Think’ strategy, wireless technology in the PC space and why IBM’s sales reps in the region are all using WiFi

IBM recently rebranded its desktops, notebooks and displays and brought them under the ‘Think’ umbrella. The ThinkPad has always been a very strong brand. Was this an attempt to graft some of that ThinkPad magic onto your desktop product line?

The ThinkPad is about innovation; it’s about offering new capabilities to customers. A lot of features that you see in notebooks today have been driven by the ThinkPad—such as the TrackPoint, integrated CD-ROM and DVD drives. Innovation is important to a large cross-section of the business community. The ThinkPad brand is second only to the IBM brand. Its brand recall is very high. The Think strategy offers a compelling and meaningful value proposition. The ThinkPad brand name is one part of it. Tom Watson Sr. coined the term ‘Think’ 75 years ago. Today the word is the start of a strong branding exercise.

While asset prices will always be a part of decision-making criteria and saving a few dollars is interesting, reducing support costs by 10, 20 or 30 percent is more compelling. We have developed tools along with firms such as Gartner to help customers estimate potential savings [through the Think strategy]. The cost of ownership isn’t in acquisition, it’s in support and deployment. We want to give the customer a real business advantage through technology.

How does the Think strategy translate into products?

Take a look at these products:

Rapid Restore: It takes a copy of your system once a day, as per your preferences. We also offer a 20 GB external (USB) drive—the rapid restore external drive (RRED). You can plug it into a system that has crashed and run your applications off the RRED; restoring the system can be done when you get the time.

Image Ultra: Enterprises maintain a number of images (operating system, applications and hardware drivers) that are specific to a particular function (department, job role). The parameters include three or four operating systems, multiple platforms (both current and superseded hardware) and applications. Take a hypothetical case where a company has three hardware platforms that it uses to run three operating systems, and ten software applications are preloaded—that’s 90 combinations. Supporting 90 different images is a time consuming and expensive proposition. With Image Ultra you have one super image that accounts for every scenario. Images are independent of hardware, software and applications. You load everything onto the image and deselect stuff you don’t need based upon your department, operating system, applications and hardware. The technology lets organisations deploy PCs much faster.

Access Connections: It does away with the need for a user to reconfigure a PC every time his or her connection changes. You may have broadband at home and wireless in the office. Just select the right profile and your network connection gets configured automatically.

IBM’s known for churning out patents. What’s new on the technology front from the PC group?

The distributed wireless security auditor (DWSA) finds rogue access points on a wireless LAN. Sometimes, people in an organisation set up WLANs on their own that outsiders can tap into. The DWSA picks out insecure devices and it tells you on which floor that device is located. It does this by polling all the access points.

Bluetooth is happening. We are integrating Bluetooth across our range of ThinkPads. A year ago we started offering Bluetooth on the T-Series. On the desktop we are taking a USB-attached or card-based approach to providing Bluetooth support.

Is WiFi a killer application?

Centrino is a game changing technology and a compelling reason for customers to reinvest. We have wireless-enabled every PC sales office across the Asia-Pacific and hundreds of IBM sales representatives across the region are benefiting from wireless computing. We believe that sales reps need to use the technology they sell.