‘Less Direct, More Channel’ is where IBM would aim to go

Lata Singh    
Director – Partner Ecosystem, IBM India & South Asia

“The ecosystem is at the heart of IBM’s go to market strategy. It plays a pivotal role in IBM’s journey to capture the USD 1 trillion hybrid cloud market opportunity. The IBM PartnerWorld Program is aligned to support this mission.  

We have seen that the client needs are of varied types, causing partner models to evolve.  The IBM PartnerWorld Program is therefore aligned to the market needs & is built on key tenants including Simplification, Flexibility, Focusing on partner expertise and capabilities, and Enabling partner differentiation through benefits & skills.

Core components of IBM’s Partner Programs

All program tracks are uniquely designed to help our partners significantly grow revenue and take advantage of multiple tracks as their business models evolve. With each program, there is a conscious effort to re-imagine business value for our partners. As our partners evolve in their journey, the critical factor is the Competency that they develop in-house as well as the support required for presales. IBM Technology Zone is the single point of entry for partners to easily access environments to build technical "Show Me" demos that can be shared with peers for customer proof of concepts.

IBM offers a wide array of benefits including the USD 1 billion investment commitment in the ecosystem and providing technical expertise through the Hybrid Cloud Build team to develop their solution or taking it to market. Recently, IBM announced 15 new benefits across technical, go-to-market, financial and skills development. In addition, we unified the framework across Build, Service, Sell Competencies to allow new and existing partners to expand their solutions and build skills. We also launched 10 New Competencies across build and service in addition to the 7 existing competencies.

Our Chairman & CEO, Arvind Krishna recently shared “less direct, more channel is where we would want to go.”  Therefore, we are constantly innovating to provide a framework to guide partners through their journey and showcase clear benefits of the program while ensuring fairness and transparency for all.”