IBM PartnerWorld: IBM’s Hot Tub Time Machine

Sitting in the general session of day one of IBM’s (IBM) PartnerWorld Leadership Conference in Las Vegas, I was struck with an overwhelming sense of déjà vu—or, as baseball great Yogi Berra once said, “It’s déjà vu all over again.” IBM was speaking to its hundreds of channel partners, who were assembled from more than 89 countries, about the opportunities associated with the cloud, emphasizing the myriad ways partners could use the cloud to their advantage.

“The cloud at the nexus of all innovation, giving all organizations the ability to innovate at speed. With the advent of the cloud everybody can play and in a broader ecosystem than ever before,” said IBM Cloud SVP Robert LeBlanc. “It is a transition and an opportunity for clients to reinvent themselves, their industries and grow their business,”

That’s great news for the channel—if the year was 2010. But last time I checked, it’s 2015.

IBM should have had this conversation with its partners five years ago. Yet it is a central theme of the presentations on day one. Between SoftLayer, Bluemix and PureApplication System, IBM offered up the ways partner can play in the cloud, from development to helping their customers change the way they do business.

Call me crazy, but I believe the market has moved well beyond identifying opportunities and vendors are now looking for ways to differentiate themselves.

That, right there, may be the source of IBM’s current woes.

Is this event indicative of the pace of change within IBM? Does it really think cloud is so brand new that its partners don’t understand where—and how—they can sell cloud and be a part of a cloud ecosystem?

I want to give IBM the benefit of the doubt—that its international channel partners perhaps aren’t as far down the road as its North American channel partners. If that’s the case, I suggest the conversation was a bit too elementary.

Sure, IBM also is highlighting its niftier technologies—analytics, Watson, security, services, systems, commerce—during PWLC, and frankly, the stories are much more interesting. What Watson is doing in the way of cognitive computing is both fascinating and frightening to me (but that’s another blog post for another time). Why IBM is putting so much emphasis on the cloud is beyond me.

I understand the cloud is driving so much of the business transformation happening in today’s marketplace. But I’m confident in my belief that IBM’s channel partners understand that as well. And they’ve understood it for a while. Let’s move the conversation beyond the elementary and hear how IBM is setting itself apart from its competitors in the cloud space. That will make for a much more compelling discussion.