Making the Case for Optimism

IBM’s EMEA channel ecosystem leader David Stokes opened the event an upbeat tone telling everyone he is making the case for optimism. This is despite some depressing headlines in the news as of late. He sees opportunities for IBM’s channel by serving customers with a “multilateral network of partners working together,” he said.

Stokes told the audience AI, hybrid cloud, cybersecurity, sustainability and helping business build a data fabric remain big channel opportunities.

“Only 30 percent of workloads have moved to the cloud,” he said citing an opportunity to help companies more applications and data to the cloud. Stokes also said business adoption remains low and is poised to double in the next three years. To succeed, partners must adapt new ways of working and adopt what he called co-creating to solve customer problems.

“Technology has always been a force for progress and it is not different this time around.”