IBM Confirms Partner Program Updates at PartnerWorld Leadership Conference

IBM PartnerWorld — With cognitive solutions at the core of IBM’s business strategy, the vendor on Tuesday confirmed partner program elements that emphasize cognitive computing, cloud and competency-based recognition.

The redesigned IBM PartnerWorld Program announced at last year’s partner conference went live last week. The focus of the new program is on new competencies and client satisfaction, as well as traditional measures such as revenue. Most importantly, the new program is designed to prep partners for doing business in what IBM calls the Cognitive Era.

Tuesday’s announcement, made at IBM’s PartnerWorld Leadership Conference, confirmed that the company plans to add additional competencies in the second quarter, taking the number from 36 to more than 40. New competencies are: Information, Risk and Protection to protect customers’ critical information; two cloud competencies – Cloud Video to help customers stream, capture, manage and deliver video, and High Speed Transfer to bring cost savings and efficiency gains to customers who move large volumes of data over public and private IP networks; and  a new competency called IBM Global Financing. IBM also noted that Watson Internet of Things will offer Continuous Engineering to help with engineering innovative products and systems.

“As digital and cloud solutions continue to transform industries, the time is now for our partners to deliver cognitive solutions with deep vertical expertise built on the IBM Cloud platform and made available in an omni-channel environment,” Marc Dupaquier, general manager, IBM Global Business Partners, told partners. “We’ve expanded and redesigned the PartnerWorld program to guide Business Partners of all types and models in developing capabilities aligned to our cognitive solutions and cloud platform strategy to deliver high client value.”{ad}

IBM also announced for new strategic initiative for 2017:

{vpipagebreak}

Partners who need guidance on the PartnerWorld Program will have access to the IBM PartnerWorld Advisor, a new voice and text-activated Watson-based support tool located in the partner portal.{ad}

Additional news out of this week’s IBM conference includes the availability of VMware solutions on IBM Cloud via partners such as Avnet, BMSIX, Ingram Micro, Tridatum and Vicom.

According to IBM, Business Partners can now provide a one-stop shop for clients looking to migrate their on-premises VMware platforms to the cloud by providing a portfolio of life-cycle services including planning, architecture, migration and end-to-end management.