IBM PARTNER ECOSYSTEM – Part 2 Reimagining IBM’s partnership-led revenue model

IBM has made significant investments over the past 12 months to re-invent how it interacts with its partners. This includes people like me who did not know who my core stakeholders were any longer across markets as IBM underwent a significant redesign.

Indeed, the IBM partner ecosystem does not fit into one single confined box any longer. To fulfill partners’ needs, IBM had to consciously rebuild its ecosystem approach to simplify complex types of interactions and bring them to life. That’s the value of having close and consolidated strategic partnerships, reiterated IBM's executives.

I talked to several of them, who confirmed this. Sabine, give us some time, and we will share with you how we made it simpler for our global ecosystem partners to engage with us.

I discovered that there are three primary ways partners interact with IBM today.?

1. There’s the sales aspect, where IBM’s channel partners are?selling IBM’s technology.
2. There’s the building aspect, where IBM’s technology partners are?building?on or with IBM technology.
3. There’s the service aspect, where IBM’s integration partners are building services around IBM’s products.

?IBM Ecosystem’s general manager, Kate Woolley, reveals that to grow, IBM must become essential to existing partners and identify potential partners whose offerings complement IBM’s own ecosystem of products and services. For instance, IBM doubled the number of brand-specialized resources that support IBM’s business partners and increased the technical resources supporting partners by 35%. To avoid conflict and reduce engagement friction with its technology partner ecosystem, IBM removed Kyndryl’s managed services altogether from its portfolio, demonstrating how much strategic partnerships matter most to IBM over one single solution.

Investing in the ecosystem’s skills and knowledge goes beyond a single internal team.

An ecosystem is a network where partners get easy access to the resource they need. Partners told IBM that the more expertise they attain in IBM’s product offerings that they sell, the better equipped they are to win with clients.?As a result, IBM rethought its overall upskilling program to make its resources not only available to internal IBMers but also to its partner ecosystem, a part of IBM’s ongoing commitment to becoming a core enabler for its partners’ businesses so that to achieve IBM’s goal of doubling revenue through the IBM Ecosystem in the next 3–5 years.

Today, partners within the IBM partner ecosystem have access to the same free training and upskilling tools as IBMers. The enablement materials and knowledge assets (e.g., hybrid cloud, AI, security, sustainability, integration, etc.) come at no cost. They can be accessed through a simplified digital experience to ensure that the businesses of the partner ecosystem get access to the essential content needed to improve skills, understand the product portfolio, and convert deals.

Importantly, all partnership types (including channel partnerships, referral partners, or agency partners) now have access to those resources simultaneously and at all times in the same way as IBM sellers through a one-stop-shop digital learning hub that also eases credentialization and badging.?

It’s now simpler than ever to find the right training at the right time and complete the desired coursework. Users will notice a more modernized and consistent experience on the IBM training site, making it easier to find resources. Kate Woolley, IBM Ecosystem General Manager.

?The badging program has been designed to ease sharing activities on professional social media platforms such as LinkedIn. These credentials travel too with the learner.

Assets to upskill partners include:

• Sales demos:?with guidance that involves partners and enables them to run their own successful demos for clients, including verbatim scripts that highlight the benefits of an offer
• Seller presentations:?essential templates to help win deals with a target customer segment, including how to position each offering, co-marketing opportunities, and how to share advantages over competitors
• Client presentations:?ready-to-go assets for client meetings that highlight key benefits and advantages of IBM’s product and service offers
• Digital prospecting:?additional content that showcases IBM product capabilities that can be shared with clients, such as white papers, analyst reports, decks, and solutions briefs

Remaining, re-joining, or entering IBM’s Partner Ecosystem: What does this entail??

When evaluating IBM’s partner ecosystem program, it was interesting for me to review interviews run as part of IBM’s Common Grounds video series on YouTube.?

The partners engaged throughout the series echoed several crucial reasons why the IBM ecosystem program works for established and new partners.

1. It collectively addresses the digital transformation needs of customers: Working alongside other partners helps better capture the application and engineering value provided by IBM’s systems. With those technologies, applications, and solutions, customers can navigate uncertainty by ensuring the delivery of more predictable outcomes in the cloud and transforming their organizations into more resilient and responsive businesses.
2. It enhances access to innovative thinking for channel partners: Meaning commitment to the channel partners and delivering innovative thinking in the cloud. This helps clients build the modern applications they require to grow and scale their businesses in new ways, recognizing privacy and security policies to support a modern and digital workforce.
3. It ensures that partners create and customize experiences that customers want: Understanding the market trends that affect customers every single day is not an option that remains on a to-do list. It is a requirement that can be optimized through the effective deployment of technology partnerships. These partnerships result in projects and product roadmaps that matter most and impact customers’ outcomes. For instance, delivering systems that access the data, analytics, and integration required to detect and respond to client issues in minutes is essential to propel growth.
4. It eases the industrialization and democratization of technologies: Companies want to ensure that their people have access to the tools they need to be effective and flexible. To deploy agile and adaptable business models, companies must consider optimizing productivity by driving inclusivity while making it easy and enriching to decentralize working environments. They want to build resilient businesses regardless of uncertainties, know how to use resources when needed, and reduce the use of those resources when not needed, and this at the right price, so that scaling newly developed products at record speed can only be achieved via well-architected infrastructure components that communicate securely with other systems.

Equity at the core of IBM’s Ecosystem Program

IBM’s partner ecosystem work resulted in improved deal registration split among partners and introduced to each of the partnerships more than 7,000 potential deals valued at over USD $500 million globally. (Proprietary metrics obtained from IBM sales data, January 2022–August 2022.)

Partners that joined the program realized that IBM's ultimate goal is to make it:?

• easier to work with through the redesign or core partner platforms to speed decision-making and streamline engagements
• simpler to work with for partners with just a few clicks while using AI to allocate deals in minutes to the fittest partners.
• Enriching to extend opportunities to the most suitable partners, generating new revenue streams faster by ensuring that the very best skilled experts are always on the job.

If you want to know more about the new program:

1. read part one of our article on the IBM Partner Ecosystem part 1
2. review the link on IBM's Embedded Intelligence capabilities
3. review the link on IBM PartnerWorld