Jim Corgel, IBM Software Group, ISV & Developer Relations

Channel Chief Name	Jim Corgel
Channel Chief Title	General Manager, ISV & Developer Relations
Company and Division	IBM Software Group, ISV & Developer Relations
Markets Served:	Software
Company's overall 2007 revenue:	$98.8 billion
Percentage of revenue from solution providers:	~ 33%
Number of years with the company:	32
Number of years involved with indirect sales:	25
Number of employees in channel organization:	n/a
To whom do you report in your organization?	Steve Mills, Senior VP, Software Group
Does that individual report to your CEO/president?	Yes
Describe your channel organization's major accomplishments over the past year:	In 2007 we grew our ecosystem at a rapid pace, adding 10,000 new Business Partners from around the globe, and nearly 600,000 new IT professionals. We enabled these organizations and individuals to build skills, collaborate with one another, and jointly develop and deliver solutions to new markets worldwide. Our 37 IBM Innovation Centers carried out almost 8,000 technology enablements with Business Partners- this number continues to increase each year. Over 86 percent of were cross-platform. These partners worked with technology experts at the IBM Innovation Centers to port, test, and develop their solutions on IBM platforms and Linux. Then, our industry-leading sales and marketing experts helped them take these solutions to the marketplace. Developing a full breadth of capabilities to help partners at each stage of their business cycle- and connecting all of these resources together- is a big accomplishment. IBM also recognizes that technology skills are the future of business. We are helping to build sophisticated IT skills among students to promote future innovation. Today we are working with almost 2 million students across the globe to help teach skills around the next generation of technology, and we've established strong ties with over 14,000 universities. There is an incredible demand for IT skills worldwide, and we will experience a shortage in skills unless we work to meet that demand now. We also continue to help IT professionals build their skills around key technologies like SOA, Software as a Service, and open standards. Our developerWorks community delivered over 1.2M skills engagements through tutorials, webcasts, demos, and face-to-face briefings, and it is now the number one developer resource in key markets such as China and Russia.
List up to 10 of your top products sold through the channel:	Every year, thousands of partners port their solutions to IBM middleware products. Increasingly, their own clients are demanding integration and flexibility from their IT, and delivering technology based on IBM middleware enables them to provide customers with an open, integrated solution.
Describe how your partner community has grown over the past year:	We continue to grow an incredibly powerful, innovative ecosystem. 10,000 new business partners joined the IBM partner community last year alone, and 3,000 of these are from emerging markets, such as the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) countries. We also now have 6M unique registered developers on our industry-leading site for IT professionals, developerWorks, which provides access to free tools and resources that are designed to help developers grow their skills and stay educated on the latest technologies such as Web 2.0, Linux, etc. And our Academic Initiative has now educated over 2M students around the world, with over 6,700 participating professors from 14,000 universities.
Name the one individual who has had the most profound impact on your life:	My father. I've found that the values I learned in the home translated naturally to the workplace.
Please name the single most innovative initiative for which you were responsible for the past year?	In 2007 we truly helped our partners reach farther than ever before. Helping partners to expand their business to new parts of the globe required some innovative thinking on our part. Our whole team worked together to create ways and opportunities for partners to tap into the resources- including sales, marketing, and technical experts- we have in place in 170 countries to help them expand their business beyond their local, geographic markets. These companies are also continuing to rely on IBM as they look to build on an open infrastructure, freeing themselves from proprietary technologies, which is often necessary to succeed in emerging markets.
What were the key channel partner investments you made in the past year?	In April, we made some extensive changes to our PartnerWorld program. We've found that many partners, particularly smaller ones, lacked the sales, marketing, and technical resources they needed to reach the markets they wanted to reach- whether those were new clients, new industries, or new geographies. They especially needed help gaining awareness and traction in these new markets, without comprehensive in-house marketing support. We responded by introducing the concept of the Virtual Marketing Department, where we basically become the partner's marketing team. It's a large, scalable way of helping smaller channel partners generate actual leads and turn these leads into actual revenue. Other benefits include search engine optimization and tools and resources designed to help partners build leads at trade shows and other events. We also recognized and responded to our partners' need to explore key strategic technology areas like SaaS. This is a huge area of interest and concern for our ISVs: 55% of IBM PartnerWorld members are considering offering Software as a Service. We enhanced our SaaS program, creating a community where companies and their IT professionals could learn more about the SaaS model, talk to each other, and work together to build and deliver SaaS solutions. We provide education and technical support, online access to a free development environment for building a SaaS solution, marketing consultants, and sales help. We now have 3,000 ISVs in our SaaS community, and 160 in our SaaS Specialty. IBM also plans on continuing to expand our Innovation Centers into other key emerging and growing markets, such as South Africa, Turkey and Dubai, where we are seeing a great demand from ISVs looking for local resources to help drive innovation. Finally, we invested in a key resource to help partners build one of their key resources, their IT workers. We added unique collaboration capabilities developerWorks, allowing partners and IT professionals to find one another and share code, jointly develop technologies, and team up to take those products to market together.
How are you attracting the next generation of solution providers?	We've worked hard at destroying the myth that a large partner is always hard to navigate- this doesn't have to be the case. We've made great progress over the past year to make IBM an easier partner to engage and go to market with, even forming a Partner Advisory Council to solicit valuable feedback from partners. We've been able to use this input to streamline our programs and offerings based on what will deliver the most value. We help our partners- from small start-ups to mature ISVs- to gain awareness in the industry and with our other partners. We make it easy for them to collaborate with us and each other, and the next generation of solution providers understands better than anyone the need for collaboration..
What is the greatest challenge you overcame in the past year?	In 2007 we saw our marketplace continue to become more globally integrated than ever, creating new and different challenges for both our company and our Business Partners. Collaboration is essential to succeeding in a globally integrated marketplace- but linking together our partners with sales experts, technology managers, marketing experts, and even other partners in the 170 countries we do business in is no easy feat. We overcame that challenge by introducing tools like Value Nets, to help our partners connect and collaborate, and paved the way for smooth collaboration among both IT professionals and organizations to develop solutions together and take those solutions to market through our developerWorks Spaces. And we added more resources to our 37 IBM Innovation Centers around the globe, giving partners local, in-person support matched with the ability to plug into a global network- and a point of entry into the entire IBM company.

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