IBM, during the ongoing PartnerWorld Leadership Conference in Las Vegas, has announced strategic enhancements to its PartnerWorld programme to further strengthen its support to IBM Business Partners.
According to the company, the enhanced programme aims to spur growth, customer satisfaction and revenue in the Cognitive Era.
The newly redesigned PartnerWorld programme includes over 40 competencies to help Business Partners build greater expertise in high growth areas, like cloud, cognitive and security. IBM also announced key initiatives to help partners accelerate growth with embedded solutions, new IBM entry-point products, a simplified reselling process and enhanced software incentives.
“As digital and cloud solutions continue to transform industries, the time is now for our partners to deliver cognitive solutions with deep vertical expertise built on the IBM Cloud platform and made available in an omni-channel environment,” said Marc Dupaquier, General Manager, IBM Global Business Partners. “We’ve expanded and redesigned the PartnerWorld programme to guide Business Partners of all types and models in developing capabilities aligned to our cognitive solutions and cloud platform strategy to deliver high client value.”
Redesigned for the cognitive era, the revamped programme aims to enable IBM partners of all types to build high-value capabilities, increase their speed to market and helps them create new revenue streams.
The competency-based programme, according to IBM, has seen incredible momentum since its launch in 1st January, with thousands of Business Partners embracing the simplified and integrated approach to growth, recognition and benefits.
In security, IBM will offer a competency in information, risk and protection to secure customers’ critical information; and for cloud, IBM will launch two new Competencies: one in Cloud Video to help customers stream, capture, manage and deliver video and another in High Speed Transfer to bring breakthrough cost savings and efficiency gains to customers who need to move large volumes of data over public and private IP networks. Watson Internet of Things will offer continuous engineering to help with engineering innovative products and systems in the face of complexity. The company will also add a new Competency in IBM Global Financing to help partners main-stream “financing” as a core capability they can use to differentiate themselves.
IBM also highlighted that in addition to streamlining its partner focus around new Competencies, it has made enhancements in following four areas to accelerate growth in the ecosystem: First, it introduced the Embedded Solutions Agreement to make it easier for IBM Business Partners to integrate their expertise and offerings with IBM technologies and services to create distinct, commercially available, partner-branded solutions and market them to their down-stream customers. Second, the company now also offers a Ready for IBM Cloud validation, as well as other benefits designed to encourage ISVs to build and monetise their cloud solutions on the Bluemix platform. Thirdly, in Q2, IBM will launch an IBM Express Start offering to streamline the process for new Business Partners to be authorised to resell IBM entry-point products, including Software Open Distribution, IBM XaaS-Entry, PowerLinux and low-end storage products. Business Partners will now also be able to join PartnerWorld, receive pricing and resell these offerings faster than ever before with IBM Express Start. Lastly, beginning in April, IBM is enhancing its Business Partner software incentive offerings to provide the highest rewards for the highest value focusing on IBM’s Commercial segment, new client opportunities, solutions, and autonomous selling. With these new incentive offerings, IBM is providing improved line of sight, predictability, and reduced operational overhead based on our Business Partner’s feedback worldwide.
To help Business Partners quickly find information related to the PartnerWorld programme structure, Competencies, programme levels, incentives contracts and more, the company has developed IBM PartnerWorld Advisor, a new voice and text activated Watson-based support tool on the PartnerWorld portal. Building PartnerWorld support with Watson technology is another example of IBM’s focus on simplification and is geared toward providing Business Partners with all the resources they need to do business with IBM.
This new capability is being featured at the 2017 PartnerWorld Leadership Conference in Las Vegas being held from 13th to 16th February 2017.
