Emerging technology program - From business to technolgy, and not the other way around

This cnet news.com article talks about IBM's emerging technology program. An example of how this division's work is different from all the product teams that clients are more likely to meet from IBM (the client also points to the difficulty faced in reaching the appropriate people inside the ocean that is IBM!):

Take BusinessMart, a business-to-business portal that connects more than 2,000 tool and parts retailers to roughly 90 manufacturers. The portal, which handles about 2,400 orders per day, is the largest of its kind in the country, but the company faced problems connecting a variety of customer interfaces running on disparate systems.

After considering offerings from other vendors, BusinessMart settled on IBM, says chief operating officer Thies Frahm. At first, the sprawl of IBM's global reach and product mix made it hard to figure out whom within the organization to approach.

"It was very difficult for us to get the right information from IBM," he says. "There was a point in the project where we needed a much-improved relationship with IBM."

The problem, Smith says, was that BusinessMart was talking to IBM product teams, which have a tendency to plug a product into a problem in an attempt to create a solution. "BusinessMart wanted to build an ecosystem, and that's a business question," Smith says. "The product guys don't know how to answer this."

JStart intervened, built the initial middleware architecture and got BusinessMart started with the software implementation. "The emerging technology group doesn't have a lot of people, but they really have a visionary power of ideas," Frahm says.