David La Rose, General Manager for IBM Partner Ecosystem addressed IBM's new go-to-market approach and the impact of this new model locally as part of IBM Think Summit A/NZ and IBM’s Global Partner Ecosystem Rally.  

La Rose said: “The ecosystem is now at the centre of IBM's growth strategy going forward". Program enhancements have been put in place to drive growth, enable innovation, and provide value to partners. The program has been simplified to make it easier for partners to work with IBM, with clear sales coverage and access to IBM’s incumbency. IBM’s simplified internal structure aligns teams to collaborate with partners of all types to help them Build, Service and Sell with IBM.  The partner ecosystem is expected to fuel the expansion of IBM's global reach and accelerate customers' adoption of open hybrid cloud. 

La Rose profiled the supporting programs, initiatives, benefits and support available to partners to drive growth, enable innovation and provide value, following the announcement that IBM was investing $US1 billion in its partner ecosystem in January.

This included the creation of a new specialised technical engagement team to help partners modernise their products, services, and offerings across open hybrid cloud environments and support the migration of client cloud workloads across platforms and providers.

La Rose said: “This is not about locking into a particular vendor, or a particular cloud provider. The whole hybrid model and the containerisation that we've gone through, with Openshift as the glue, allows us to work with an enterprise irrespective of the cloud decisions they have made, Microsoft, AWS, IBM, Google, it doesn't matter. In fact, the whole concept here is, you want to build once and deploy anywhere. That's the core of the strategy that we've got in place.”

IBM’s Hybrid Cloud Build Team team consists of over 100 cloud architects, data scientists, cloud developers, security specialists, and developer advocates with experience in Microsoft Azure, AWS, and many other environments. The team will enable partners and their customers to bring their ideas to market using engagement models like IBM Garage and IBM’s design thinking methodology.

IBM Think Summit A/NZ 2021 is available for on demand from 19 February – 19 March here: https://event.on24.com/wcc/r/2873004/69EC956C62E873C7DA7DC6A87FF331C5?partnerref=ThinkANZWebsite

IBM’s Global Partner Ecosystem Rally 2021 is available on demand here: https://www.ibm.com/events/event/widget/ibm/bz2k65es/ibm-catalog?