Less than a year after launching its Public Sector Edge partner program at the 2005 Government XChange event, Bob Samson, vice president of worldwide system sales at IBM, updated the crowd at this week's event on the initiative's progress. Samson, who was previously general manager of IBM Global Public Sector, said Big Blue has signed on more than 1,000 partners to its Public Sector Edge program and continues to drive efforts to offer better resources and strategic help for its government, education and health-care partners.
Samson focused on how IBM is driving innovation and, in particular, how the public-sector opportunity, which represents more than $200 billion in IT spending, continues to grow at a healthy pace.
"The only way for us to get to this market effectively is through partners and a strong partner network," Samson said. He added that IBM partners have been seeing growth of around 20 percent.
Alex Gogh, vice president of marketing at IBM Global Public Sector, said that IBM will continue working to make it simple for partners do business in the public sector by offering enhanced sales and marketing support, as well as IBM's industry thought-leadership capabilities. Gogh said Public Sector Edge also will improve its public-sector-specific sales cycle help, sellers guides, client presentation and industry road maps for partners.
In addition, IBM touted Connection Tool, an online resource to help resellers, ISVs, integrators and solution providers in the public sector find and leverage other partners to better serve their customers.
"There is a lot of partnering going on within the industry, and the Connection Tool makes it easy to find out who is doing what and who you can partner with," said Al Marshall, product marketing and vendor relations manager at Boca Raton, Fla.-based PC Universe. "Particularly in the public sector, where a lot of contracts are specific to a region or down to the state- or local-type of requirement, to fully understand what it means for that area it's best to have a partner in that area."
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