IBM to Partners: Hurry Up and Get to the Cloud

Written by Michael Cusanelli
March 6, 2014

IBM Europe's Dave Kay urged channel partners to accelerate their transition to the cloud at a recent vendor event in London, citing software virtualization as a major influence in the company's latest plans for growth.

All the cool kids are moving their businesses into the cloud—are you?

More and more IT organizations are integrating cloud-based services into their businesses each month, but it’s still not fast enough for IBM (IBM), one of the largest and most influential distributors in the channel. During a recent vendor event in London, IBM Europe’s VP of Business Partners David Kay bemoaned the slow nature of many of IBM’s channel partners to dedicating their efforts to cloud computing.

Kay said IBM’s partners played a large role in the company’s CAMSS (Cloud, Analytics, Mobile, Social and Security) strategy, which increasingly will focus on rallying IBM’s resources around improving its virtualization services. The company outlined its latest strategy during last month’s PartnerWorld Leadership Conference in Las Vegas, where IBM exec Tom Rosamilia stressed that its partners need to embrace the cloud for business. Kay reiterated the importance of the cloud this week, asserting that partners who have made the transition to the cloud with IBM are seeing increased revenue growth of 2.5 times the average, leading to an estimated 7.6 revenue streams for early adopters, according to an article in Channelnomics.

“Some of our existing partners can lead IBM to the CAMSS & Commerce goals quickly,” said Kay. “For example, many of our MSPs are doing that already.”

Kay told attendees that IBM increasingly will focus on wearable technology such as smart watches in addition to mobile solutions and devices. Kay also mentioned the importance of what he calls “cognitive” computing, referring to the launch of IBM’s Watson Content Store in January. European partners will get left behind, he said, if they don’t start their transition to the cloud sooner.

Not enough of them are making enough progress quickly and I do worry about their survival into the next era of computing,” said Kay. “The move toward cloud is inexorable now, IBM is a cloud solutions player in our own capability, but [we] want to leverage our partners’ capability as well.”

Kay did not sound off on the effects virtualization would have for North American partners; however, it wouldn’t be a stretch to extend this philosophy all companies who still work primarily with legacy storage and security products. And while one can’t say that definitively virtualization is the best course of action for all IT companies, it would be hard to argue that the advent of cloud services hasn’t made business safer and easier for a majority of organizations willing to take the plunge.