Rekha Murthy, Director – One Channel, IBM India/South Asia, shares the company’s channel strategies for 2019
Key highlights 2018 and opportunities for 2019
For the first time since the rise of the internet we are witnessing a shift in the epicentre of market disruption. Today, the world is progressing ahead on the digital transformation journey with new age technologies like artificial intelligence, cognitive, blockchain, IoT and more, delivered on the cloud. 2018 witnessed acceleration in the adoption of all these technologies with business partners skilling and upskilling themselves to align their business with client requirements.
We foresee a data-driven business strategy backed by cloud and AI will continue to bring in transformational and cultural change in 2019.
At IBM, we are focused on helping businesses with their digital transformation, working very closely with our ecosystem of partners across hybrid cloud, digital business automation, digital transformation, security and fraud detection, database management and analytics, customer experience and analytics solutions. In 2019, we see an opportunity in scaling growth in the IT Infrastructure space through our core offerings of SAP HANA on Power, High Performance Computing, PowerAI and Software Defined Storage as well as new industry and business solutions around blockchain, AI and cloud.
Top tech trends for channel community
Business partners need to look out for the following trends in 2019:
- Hybrid multi-cloud architectures will replace the “one-cloud-fits-all” approach: According to research from Ovum, while 20 per cent of business processes have already moved to the cloud, 80 per cent of mission-critical workloads and sensitive data are still running on-premises because of performance and regulatory requirements. As they enter the next phase of their cloud journey, many organisations will be moving away from “one cloud fits all”.Public cloud may be a key to cost effectively accelerating digital transformation, but many enterprise data centres aren’t going anywhere, nor should they. Not every workload is a candidate for the public cloud. Businesses will increasingly drive value from the integration of public and private clouds as they seek to get the most out of their cloud investments by taking a hybrid multicloud approach. A hybrid multicloud environment uses a combination of on-premises, private cloud and public cloud architecture, with best-in-class resources from different cloud vendors. Business partners need to skill themselves and be prepared to help their clients navigate through their cloud journey.
- Cognitive Security Operations Centre: Cognitive computing, is an advanced type of artificial intelligences that leverages various forms of AI, including machine-learning algorithms and deep-learning networks, that get stronger and smarter over time. This essentially helps organisations respond to threats with greater confidence and speed. Therefore, the “cognitive SOC” is the necessary evolution of the industry to keep pace with increasing volume and sophistication of threats. Business partners have to infuse AI.
- Trust and transparency will continue to drive the AI-conversation: With companies applying new anti-bias techniques, in combination with guidance from in-house and industry ethics advisory groups, to make their products and platforms fairer. Partners also need to work with clients to build a fair and transparent AI models.
Channel directions for partners
IBM has been focused on helping businesses in their transformation journey. Through our partner outreach, we build, nurture and grow a thriving and effective ecosystem where our partners can provide solutions, services, and value-based skills to enable their client’s success.
Our strategy is three pronged– building loyalty, extending capability and accelerating time to revenue. I will continue to strengthen our partner-first model across all markets, differentiating IBM’s unique portfolio and creating value for IBM and partners. I will work with our partner community to accelerate development and delivery of cloud, AI and solutions to our clients and at the same time improve our partner end-to-end experience. I will work on increasing adoption of cloud and AI solutions, improving the partner experience and enhancing their skills on IBM platforms.
For example, IBM PartnerWorld the award-winning global programme, designed to help our partners increase demand, grow their business, and improve profitability, has been recently refreshed and enhanced with new content and offerings for partners to leverage such as;
- Refreshed market and competitive intelligence site which partners can refer and take content from to up their game in the market
- Skills gateway: A university like programme for learning for BPs
- Third party marketplaces where BPs can do digital shopping of IT solution Partner to Partner Connect.
