IBM’s Way to the Cloud Is Through the Channel

By Darryl K. Taft

IBM CEO Ginni Rometty, speaking at the IBM PartnerWorld Leadership Conference, lays out her plans for continuing the transformation of IBM—moving out of lower-value, low-margin businesses to higher-value targets including cloud, big data and analytics, mobile, security and more.

Marc Dupaquier, general manager of IBM Global Business Partners, tells the audience of IBM partners about Big Blue’s new One Channel Team, which aligns channel operations from across the company.

Robert LeBlanc, IBM’s new cloud honcho, tells partners how the cloud is the new growth engine for IBM and its business partners. “This is a huge opportunity for our clients to reinvent themselves,” IBM’s senior vice president of cloud said.

IBM has more on-ramps to the cloud than any other vendor, according to LeBlanc. “SoftLayer was one of the best acquisitions we ever made,” he said.

Sandy Carter, general manager of ecosystems and social business evangelism at IBM, tells business partners how IBM can help them using the tag line from Jerry Maguire: “Show me the money!”

Major opportunities for business partners include big data and analytics, cloud, mobile, social, security and the Internet of things, said Steve Mills, executive vice president of IBM Software and Systems. “Our model is to open the aperture for you to engage with customers,” Mills said. “We are hyper-focused on the ability to make money—when you make money, we make money.”

Ninety-one percent of net new software in 2014 was designed and built for cloud delivery, according to new IBM cloud leader Robert LeBlanc.

Stephen Gold, chief marketing officer of IBM’s Watson Group and vice president of partner programs and venture capital investments at IBM, said there are two types of channel partners for IBM’s Watson cognitive computing technology: resellers who take the finished Watson products and simply resell them to customers, and those who build out apps of their own based on Watson services and in turn sell them into the market. There are about 100 resellers selling things like Watson Explorer and other products. Plus, IBM has more than 180 partners that build their own Watson-based apps, Gold said.

At the IBM PartnerWorld Leadership Conference 2015 press conference, Tom Rosamilia, senior vice president of IBM Systems, discusses among other things how IBM Power Systems are designed for data and optimized for cloud with open ecosystem innovation.

During the IBM PartnerWorld Leadership Conference 2015 press conference, Carter said IBM and industry research indicates that developers influence up to 67 percent of the decisions being made within organizations.