Quoting from the press release:

IBM today announced a virtualization education and sales initiative designed to ease the adoption of virtualization technologies by small and medium businesses (SMB). The program includes adding new capabilities and enablement programs to more than 40 IBM Business Partner Innovation Centers that are selling IBM's Virtualization Engine portfolio.

IBM's small and medium size clients are reaping the benefits of the company's mainframe-inspired virtualization technologies being injected across other platforms, driving new economics in their IT infrastructures. IBM's virtualization portfolio is designed to help increase the availability, resiliency and utilization of clients' infrastructures.

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The new IBM Virtualization Test Drive program is designed to help partners more easily sell IBM's Virtualization Engine portfolio. To kick off the partner program, IBM is using selected Business Partner Innovation Centers throughout North America to demonstrate to SMB customers the benefits of virtualizing their server and storage infrastructures.

The program includes assistance in setting up a center of competence, technical and industry education, sales enablement and support and tools to help IBM Business Partners assist their clients to design and implement virtualization solutions around IBM's Virtualization Engine portfolio. The IBM Business Partners can also provide a "real world" environment in their innovation centers to simulate client scenarios and test applications. By attending training sessions at the IBM Business Partner's Innovation Centers, clients can see that IBM's Virtualization Engine offerings go beyond the abilities of most competitive offerings: The IBM technology portfolio can reduce both planned and unplanned outages, ease data migrations and lower the costs for disaster recovery sites as well as manage an entire virtualized infrastructure.

Modeled after a successful sales and training campaign for the IBM eBusiness program, the new initiative offers an aggressive strategy to overcome the major challenges inhibiting clients' adoption of virtualization. Key to this strategy is proving the business benefits of virtualization, expanding the skills available to assist in design and deployment, and extending market reach through business partners.

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IBM is expanding the program to Europe and plans to roll out the "Virtualization Test Drive" partner program worldwide later this year. The partner program augments IBM's broad internal sales force that focuses on selling IBM's Virtualization Engine portfolio. Additionally, the program complements IBM's software partner initiative -- Ready for Virtualization -- that extends support for applications on IBM servers and storage managed by IBM's Virtualization Engine portfolio.