From Zero to 100 MPH – Building, protecting and monetizing your cloud solution

IBM has never been more focused on helping creators of new software and service solutions to develop and deploy on the cloud.  Earlier this year at our THINK and PartnerWorld conferences, our CEO Ginni Rometty reinforced IBM’s commitment to deepening our ecosystem of business partners and gave a “shout out” to ISVs who build and deploy on IBM Cloud, as essential to our business.  And our SVP of Watson and Cloud Platform, David Kenny highlighted the $20M IBM is investing to fuel ISV Growth.

I’ve spent my entire career working with companies and business partners to drive Innovation – Innovation that delivers value and differentiation to their clients.  I now have the honor of leading the ISV community in IBM.

This will be the first of many blogs with the ISV and MSP community.   I want to start a discussion around how partnering with IBM can benefit your company.  And how IBM can benefit from partnering with you!  I will blog about many topics:  customer value, market trends, new capabilities, and ISV programs.   Let me know in comments sections other discussions you would like to see.

This first blog is about speed.   It is intended to guide ISVs to go fast and win quickly.  Read on.

Internal and External Business Threats  

Your business strategy and your technology are inseparable.  Internal threats include siloed data and systems, gaps in technical expertise, and the inability to react to market changes quickly.

While externally your competitors are closing in with new born-on-digital companies stealing your market while rewriting customer expectations.  And new business models are reinventing your industry, changing the game altogether.

Go Faster with Smarter Applications

To stay ahead of the market and deliver differentiated value, IBM recommends IP Builders execute concurrent approaches to building smarter applications, including some or all of the following:

• Speed innovation and operations by putting the right workloads on the right cloud

• Leverage APIs to integrate and monetize your IP

• Modernize and re-use cloud native microservices

• Inject new capability into your solution, such as AI and Blockchain

Successful IP Builders follow these 5 Imperatives

1. Build for portability, integration and interoperability to move fast and have choices

2. Design for data and own your insights

3. Embed AI into works-flows to deliver signature industry experiences

4. Enable trust, resilience and security so you never compromise

5. Amplify market access to accelerate beyond your boundaries

Successful IBM Partnerships

Get clinical results faster.  IBM Business Partner Bluebee launched its genomics data process platform hosted in IBM Data Centers across Europe and the U.S.. “With IBM Cloud, you can engineer a system fitted exactly to the task at hand.” – Kurt Florus, Chief Technical Officer.

Turn today’s challenges into tomorrow’s opportunities.  IBM Business Partner EVRY embraced a fresh go-to-market strategy, reinventing its IT services business around the cloud delivery model. “We’re continuing to be a strong local partner for customers while adding global reach with IBM.” – Bjonar Engebretsen, CTO

Give customers what they really want.  IBM Business Partner Open has developed a solution called Moodpeek, which allows companies to monitor engagement with their apps. “Thanks to IBM, we have an unlimited horizon to how far we can take our Moodpeek solution, and how many businesses we can help engage new customers.” —Manuel Pennequin, Mobile Analytics Director.

Getting Started

If you are an Independent Software Vendor, Managed Solution Provider or Cloud Solution Provider IBM can help you evolve an Idea into Value.   How? Through a three-phase engagement model.

Phase One: We establish alignment by identifying mutual business objectives and define a synergistic go to market plan.  Then we establish the solution scope for cloud-enabled transformation and map resources across both our organizations.

Phase Two: We design and validate your solution. This includes an architectural review of the solution, including design, cloud service type, migration planning and proof of concept validation.

Phase Three: We jointly prepare enablement and launch offering plans across selected channels.  And we help expand your solution’s reach with sales win planning, co-marketing and client advocacy activities.

Are you ready to take your solution to the next level?  Looking to quickly expand globally?  Need to monetize your existing solution?

Visit www.ibm.com/cloud/partners and complete the ISV benefits form. A qualified IBM Channel Representative will be in touch and help you get started.