When it comes to companies offering managed services, IBM is the eight hundred pound gorilla in the market place. An interesting move last week saw Big Blue launch a new service targeted explicitly at managing Web Servers that are located at customer's own premises rather than at IBM data centres.

The new service is aptly named 'Services Anywhere' and is targeted at organisations that are interested in making use of managed services but who wish to continue to keep the physical servers at their own premises or in their current co-location centre. Stuart Bean, Director of e-business hosting with IBM Global Services indicated that Services Anywhere is designed to appeal to organisations running between thirty and one thousand Web Servers. IBM builds a remote operations console on site and link back to IBM's own management facility via a Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection.

The new service may appeal to customers who have specific security concerns (especially those in the financial services and government sectors) or those that have been put off making use of hosting companies, some of whom are not perceived as being particularly stable. As far as possible, one can be reasonably confident that IBM will be around for the length of any services contract, no matter how long it may run.

At launch the new offering will cover services such as security (firewall management, intrusion detection, virus alerts etc.), storage services, application services (such as middleware and database support), network and systems monitoring services and 'performance services' e.g. load balancing, content caching etc.

It does appear that the basic offering does not include a Service Level Agreement (SLA) similar to those that IBM supplies when it offers such managed services at its own data centres. However, suitably agreed SLAs can be included subject to extra charges and the supporting infrastructure being in place at the host site. It is hard to see how any services contract could be implemented without exacting SLA information being in place.

Services Anywhere is available in North America and Latin America now and IBM plan to make it available in Europe and the Asia in July.

It will be fascinating to see how successful this middle of the road approach will be, especially in Europe where the employee issues surrounding service outsourcing can be very complex. However, it is clear that IBM hopes to use this 'first step' outsourcing approach to gain customer confidence and encourage users to make more widespread use of the range of managed services/outsourcing offerings that the company can supply. Services Anywhere may prove to be the services sprat to catch bigger fish over time.