Shift to Managed Services

Channel Furutres: Are these new partners or existing partners that have shifted to that focus?

IBM’s David La Rose: Both. And that includes activating and reactivating many of the partners that we already had as part of our ecosystem. We started last year with a very aggressive recruitment effort of what we call marquee partners, those that we don’t do any business with, to come on board, understand the portfolio, and build with or on our platform as we go forward. And we’re doubling that investment this year in terms of resources that we are putting behind our recruitment efforts.

CF: To what extent are those partners focused on or delivering managed services as their key go-to-market these days?

DLR: The majority of what we would call our traditional partner base that grew their businesses on the back of the IBM portfolio are now seeing more than 40% of their business dependent on integrating solutions in some sort of managed services environment.