Sam Palmisano, chairman, president, and CEO of IBM, said during his keynote that solution providers who want to grow in the face of a changing business environment will find the most success by thinking global with solutions for smaller and midsize customers.
Palmisano said that discussing the adjustments partners need to make in the face of the major changes taking place in the worldwide IT market far overshadows the need to talk about selling new things. "Because the world is changing, we need to make some adjustments," he said. "We need to make some shifts. We need to make the kind of investments to capture (new opportunities)."
Such changes are not cyclical or quarterly happenings, Palmisano said. "These shifts that are occurring are fundamentally real, and creating different kinds of opportunities for all of us around the world," he said.
The first is the emergence of global economies, where potential clients in countries around the world represent a new level of skills and a new level of increased demand for services.
The second, which is very complimentary, is a dramatic shift in the computing model away from the PC and towards networked infrastructures, which is enabling a worldwide talent pool to participate in the global expansion and enabling businesses to quickly go after emerging opportunities. The third, he said, is customer focus on innovation and integration, a focus that enables IBM and its solution providers to create new value and integrate on a global scale.
At the end of the day, CIOs are trying to set an IT agenda that is transformational for their companies, Palmisano said. "Yes, they need IT infrastructure, and they need software, and they need servers, and they need everything to get it done, but that's not the outcome," he said. "That's just the input."
