Test 425: IBM System z Solution Sales V2

Section 1 - Customer Requirements / Qualification

1. Qualify the customer by confirming their expectations, identifying their decision making process, and ascertaining their compelling reason(s) to act.
2. Determine financial justification for system acquisition (TCO, ROI, customer budget, business goals).
3. Determine customer's growth requirements (current and future performance and capacity).
4. Identify and describe business requirements that can be met by IBM System z capabilities and technologies.
5. Develop application volumes and requirements.
6. Evaluate existing systems environment.

Section 2 - Value Proposition

1. Quantify the business value of new System z features and functions or a new or existing customer.
2. Describe System z architectural advantages to a new customer
1. scalability
2. clustering
3. performance
4. RAS
5. investment protection


3. Describe business value of IBM System z flexibility
1. VSE
2. VM
3. MVS
4. virtualization
5. partitioning

Section 3 - Develop Business Solution

1. Identify resources needed to achieve predictable performance of the customer's requirements.
2. Differentiate server performance using customer application benchmarks, industry benchmarks data.
3. Recognize application sizing elements. (transaction rates, database hits, transaction spikes, CoD)
4. Differentiate IBM System z family members including special models.
5. Compare available System z operating systems.
6. Identify networking solutions (SNA, TCP/IP, Tivoli, etc.).
7. Identify systems management tools available for IBM System z (WebSM, Tivoli, etc.).
8. Guide customer through IBM System z operating systems, middleware, ISV and other applications pricing.
9. Compare IBM system storage options for System z.

Section 4 - Competition

1. Compare IBM System z competitive advantages
1. architecture
2. performance
3. balanced system
4. TCO
5. Virtualization

to used equipment and other architectures (Sun, HP, and other IBM).


2. Compare zOS advantages to other operating systems (e.g., Solaris, Windows, HP-UX, Linux).
3. Compare IBM System z terminology with competitive terms.