IBM Partnerworld Emphasizes SMB

Everything at IBM’s PartnerWorld conference in Las Vegas this week was really big – from the enormous Mandalay site (with its three hotels and 1.5 million square foot conference center) to the meeting itself, nearly doubled in size from last year.  “Main tent” (general) sessions were held in a Las Vegas-sized event venue normally reserved for prizefights and celebrity shows.

IBM offered some pizzazz of its own – guest speakers George Will and Robert Redford – and gift Blackberries, pre-loaded with the conference program. 

But the real excitement was in the news IBM wanted to share with its partners.  There was lots of that; so much that we feel a kind of road map is in order.

1. Highest priority went to IBM’s own Sam Palmisano, summarizing the On Demand strategy and noting the progress to date.  As always, this kind of presentation is part a report, part cheerleading, and part a call to action
   
   

2. The Call to Action was the most interesting part.  Throughout the event, IBM emphasized its reliance on its partners (no surprise), but reserved much of that emphasis for talking about its plans (and significant funding) for jointly and aggressively marketing to SMB customers.  
   

(Normally, that means customers with fewer than 1,000 employees, but in IBM-speak, the emphasis is a bit different.  While partners get to define their own focus, of course, IBM’s mid-market emphasis is generally on customers with 500 to a few thousand employees, and their small-market programs (always through partners) are usually at customers in the 50 to a few hundred range.)

3. IBM took advantage of this PartnerWorld to announce a number of programs that will support partners in a variety of categories -- ISVs, resellers, and systems integrators – in everything from planning which IBM programs to select, to training and technical enablement, to a variety of marketing support programs ranging from lead generation to joint marketing.  In these efforts, IBM is leveraging technology as much as possible, significantly improving their PartnerWorld web site to make navigation much easier, and providing a variety of training and support programs on-line.
   
   

4. IBM is also taking the same vertical approach to its partner activities that it has taken with its own direct sales force.  Partners and partner offerings are being organized into vertical Industry Networks, so that partners with similar needs and skills will be organized into communities of effort and expertise.  These PartnerWorld Industry Networks for ISVs (PWIN) will initially cover six industries (banking, financial markets, healthcare, life sciences, retail, and telecommunications), with more to follow.
   
   

5. Amidst the cheerleading and the recruiting was some preening.  GM of IBM ISV and Developer Relations Buell Duncan was pleased to announce that IBM had signed 200 ISVs to their platforms, with many more in the pipeline.  Broader programs, like the Vertical Industry Networks, are expected to expand that number substantially.
   
   

6. PartnerWorld had lots of IBM partner-oriented product offerings, too.  Notable are:

• OPAL (Orchestration and Provisioning Automation Library) gives business partners tools to help them automate customers’ IT environments by providing automation of many previously manual tasks involved in deploying new applications, updating existing applications, and configuring and provisioning systems.  OPAL permits, as much as the IT customer desires to be run automatically, with human approvals or decisions inserted wherever the customer would prefer such intervention.  It makes the IT administrative management task faster, more efficient, and much less expensive.
  

• Business Partner Program for Business Performance Management allow business partners to provide a business-wide real-time integrated view of business intelligence, business performance, and IT performance.  It is supported by IBM middleware plus a set of frameworks and the CEI (Common Event Infrastructure) software development toolkit. This permits business partners to provide industry-specific BPM solutions to their customers.

• Solution Builder Express is a program to help partners create and deploy industry specific solutions in the SMB market with Express-based solutions.  It includes a $500 million investment by IBM in demand generation education, teaming, and sales incentives and enablement.  It includes Solution Starting Points for six solution areas (business integration, business intelligence, content management, e-commerce, infrastructure, and portal/workplace), each from an industry point of view.

• Integrated Runtime (IRT) is a new multi-part packaging of pre-configured IBM middleware, designed to let ISVs develop for multiple platforms (Windows, Linux and OS/400) and includes WebSphere Application Server Express and DB2 UDB Express, together with technology to allow the ISV to package IRT with his application and prepare the entire stack for easy deployment.

IBM is backing up its partner programs not just with new product offerings, a new vertical alignment, and significant financial resources, but also with substantial technical resources, both on the web, and in Innovation Centers across the world.  Every vendor is looking for a bigger piece of the rapidly growing SMB market.  The trick will be finding the right combination of products, expertise, and partners to gain that prize.  IBM is determined that they are rapidly heading in the right direction.  

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