With IBM’s strong footprint in the market place, the company continues to support its clients during the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. The outbreak of COVID-19 as a pandemic has thrown open numerous challenges to our clients and business partners, across industries and segments. The immediate challenge which almost every client and business partner organization is going to deal with is related to working capital management and cash flow. This is because the revenues in most of the industries will take a hit and the fixed costs won’t go away. In response to this situation, IBM has enacted sizable stimulus measures to counteract the disruption caused to partners & clients.
“As our business partners and clients work to come out of this situation, we have announced, “The IBM Systems Stimulus Package” for our Clients, Client Facing Partners and Distributors to help them wade through the overheads. For our India clients, we will offer a zero percent or interest free four quarterly installment package for IBM Power and IBM Storage hardware purchases made between April 1st and June 30th, 2020. This is a short term package to address the immediate term where we are offering different payment models to our clients. Furthermore, we are supporting our IBM channel partners with additional programs to enhance their profitability in these trying times as well,” said Viswanath Ramaswamy – Director, Systems I/SA.
Breather for partners
After the Covid-19 outbreak, most of the companies are facing multiple challenges to run their business. We have reached a scenario where businesses are rethinking before committing to any additional expenses and are more focused on investing in business continuity.
The IBM Systems Stimulus package comes as a breather in this scenario. Ananthanarayanan V, SBA Info Solutions, Chennai said, “As an IBM business partner this offering will help me in concluding the pending deals which the customers had made during the FY 2019-2020 end. The client financing option with zero interest rate and quarterly payment option will help customers the flexibility to make investments in the IT infrastructure, thereby helping the customers to better invest their available funds for other business-critical needs. This package with additional incentives will help and leave extra cash at the partner’s ecosystem. This acts as a lifeline scheme for the current scenario for both customers and the partners in improving their business as initially planned.”
Deepak Jadhav, VDA Infosolutions said, “The COVID-19 pandemic has made it very challenging for businesses; the disruption caused by the virus has made businesses to think in unique and different ways. Customers are now increasingly exercising caution on what, where, and how to make investments. This has resulted in postponing their purchase decision for close to 6-9 months until the situation stabilizes.”
“This package is a very thoughtful proposition laid out by the company to help partners as well as customers to overcome the problematic situation. This will help partners to go with the right proposal to the customers to ensure sales processes are complete, which otherwise would have got stuck due to budget restrictions. This package will also help partners to maintain margins which were under stress due to tough negotiations by customers,” Jadhav concluded.
