IBM today at the PartnerWorld at Think 2018 conference expanded its campaign to simplify doing business via the channel by making it simpler for them to build and sell solutions via the cloud using technologies provided by IBM.
Also, IBM is also cutting the size of its standard contract for partners down to four pages, says Jacqueline Woods, chief marketing officer for IBM Global Business Partners.
Woods says the overall goal is to make it easier for partners to develop their intellectual property, while at the same time streamlining the processes they need to navigate to partner with IBM.
“Everything we are doing in the channel needs to be viewed against that background,” says Woods.
IBM today announced it would provide partners with up to 10 TB of IBM Cloud Object storage, 100,000 conversations using IBM Watson Assistant, and $50,000 in services for partners migrating over $20,000 per month in workloads from a competitor’s cloud. Once built those applications can not only be showcased on the IBM Cloud Marketplace but also as many as ten other cloud marketplaces that IBM now distributes both its software and solutions from partners, says Woods.
Channel partners will also be provided expanded trial access to software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications provided by IBM, including sandboxes, and additional market development funds.
Finally, IBM also announced Watson Build 2.0., a renewal of contest that rewards the partner that builds the most innovative solution using the application programming interfaces (APIs) that IBM uses to expose various cognitive services enabled by the IBM Watson artificial intelligence cloud service.
Locked in a battle with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Google for control of the cloud, IBM now clearly recognizes how strategic channel partners have become. The more applications consumed on the IBM cloud, the more competitive IBM can be in terms of leveraging scale to maintain cloud pricing parity with cloud rivals. Because of that requirement, IBM is now a lot more aggressive when it comes to recruiting partners that have their own intellectual property versus those that merely want to resell a service.
The good news, says Woods, is that as the distinction between resellers, systems integrators, application developers and managed service providers continues to blur the base of channel partners that have developed their own intellectual property continues to expand.
It remains to be seen how all the attention cloud service providers now have on the channel results in higher profits for partners. But it’s clear that just about all of them are now more willing than ever to do what’s necessary to help the partner build and deliver cloud application services.
Be First to Comment