Partner Ecosystems: The New B2B Competitive Edge

Modern organizations are attempting to digitally transform, provide better customer experiences, become agile in uncertain times with technology predictability, utilize the cloud to drive innovation, and develop secure environments for their mobile workforce.

Essentially, organizations need the technology and tools to effectively traverse current challenges in addition to tomorrow’s threats and opportunities.

Ronald van Loon is an IBM partner and is applying his experience as an industry analyst to explore the increasingly important impact of a strong partner ecosystem.

Technology partnerships help businesses solve business challenges, address IT skills shortages, and achieve digital transformation and modernization goals. Partner ecosystems are critical to help close product and capability gaps and work together to develop products, such as integrations or apps.

76% of recently surveyed business leaders believe that in the next five years, current business models will be unrecognizable and ecosystems will be the primary change agent. B2B companies are seeking to increase efficiencies and generate new revenue streams to accelerate their business goals and embrace new means of operating in a post-pandemic world.?

Advantages of a Partner Ecosystem

Partner ecosystems will be a key competitive advantage and means to speed up time-to-market moving forward. This demands a community-centric, synergetic approach that enables partners to co-innovate, co-sell, and cultivate trust to differentiate market offerings.

Channel partners have to be recognized, aligned with values and business objectives, recruited, onboarded, and trained. There also needs to be a collective vision of shared tools that can help exploit mutually beneficial sales and marketing opportunities.?

The complexity of modern B2B ecosystems is out-pacing traditional tools and businesses are looking to more co-selling approaches to thrive in rapidly evolving, dynamic markets. DIY approaches are often insufficient to address new ventures or create repeatable offerings, for example.

A strong partner ecosystem can be transformative and requires performance tracking, partner transparency, alignment and adaptably, and the ability to scale repeatable processes to improve customer experiences.

In a dedicated effort to expand, prioritize, and reinvigorate its partner ecosystem and double IBM’s ecosystem revenue within the coming three to five years, IBM is placing ecosystem partners at the focal point of its go-to-market strategy and focusing on delivering a cohesive, end-to-end partner experience. The company’s current ecosystem consists of over 55,000 partners, including small and large ISVs, channel partners, infrastructure partners, hyperscalers, consulting firms, and technology partners.

Partner Ecosystems will Support the Future Global Economy

Ecosystems will be a crucial factor in almost all aspects of the global economy by 2023 and drive approximately $80 million in revenue annually, or a third of the total global revenue. Organizations are no longer limited to the confines of their industry and can partner with other organizations to deliver better services and products to their customers throughout their whole journey.

IBM’s reimagined partner ecosystem is addressing the new digital ecosystem imperative and the traditional challenges of partner alliances by:

• Changing its Partner Plus program and providing partners with access to the same technical badges and selling enablement assets already utilized by IBM sellers. This includes no-cost access to resources like sales demos and client presentations, and a new learning hub that strives to deliver a consistent user experience.??
• Doubling the volume of brand-specific resources, and increasing technical resources by 35% to better support partners.
• Offering technical specialists to create proof-of-concepts (POCs) to assist partners in showcasing technical solutions to their clients.
• Providing new functionalities via their IBM Partner Plus (which consolidates 45 tolls into one) so partners can connect with the right people when they need to, including IBM sellers, to save time, increase efficiency, and reduce duplication.
• The new Partner Portal features, like technical support, ChatBot, auto deal share, Chatter, and auto-pass, are designed to help partners focus more of their time on their business instead of the operational side of the IBM collaboration.?
• Supporting partners, regardless of where they’re at in their data and analytics journey, in successfully participating in an AI and hybrid cloud-driven future.

Opportunity Awaits with Partner Ecosystems

Partner ecosystems are an important opportunity to address increasingly complex business challenges, deliver better services and capabilities to clients, and contribute to the future global ecosystem economy.?

Be sure to check out IBM Partner Plus for more information on the power of the partner ecosystem.