IBM Betting Hard On VARs For Hosted E-Business Partnerships

IBM

IBM has a real need for more solution provider relationships than it currently has, said James Corgel, general manager for e-business hosting services at the company.

As a result, IBM is looking to recruit not only solution providers that bring stand-alone technology offerings that enhance IBM's infrastructure offerings, but also people with know-how in the business process area or in other certain application areas, said Corgel.

Such solution providers should also have technological point-to-point offerings that can complement IBM's infrastructure, with industry know-how about business processes such as enterprise resource management, or who are skilled in the particular problems in a particular industry, he said. Size of the partner, he said, is not important.

Among new initiatives aimed at partners in the e-business hosting space is an expansion of the company's lead-pass program under which solution providers who pass a lead to IBM Global Services for hosting would be rewarded once the deal is closed.

To get solution providers more involved in the customer relationship, IBM on Monday introduced its e-business remarketer program, which allows the solution provider to stay involved from the time the client is introduced until the solution is defined, Corgel said. "In other words, the relationship, when you bring it to us, remains with you through the entire selling and installing process," he said.

In response to solution providers looking to increase their sales of IBM's hosting business capabilities, the company unveiled a number of new initiatives.

Among them is a set of infrastructure bundles consisting of from one to any number of servers, complemented with all the necessary Internet routers and firewalls, said Corgel. Such bundles, which are designed on a case-by-case basis, allow a partner to complement its own capabilities with a secure, reliable hosted infrastructure offering, he said.

For clients looking for more in-depth hosting capabilities, IBM also introduced infrastructure packages bundled with managed services. "Customers today and perspective clients [both want to move up the value chain," Corgel said. "They want to have more capability provided from IBM and our partners on things that are as simple as just monitoring the performance of a hosted application, interjecting where necessary to prevent intrusion; deeper, more secure double firewall capabilities from time to time; and a much richer set of managed services."

In the application area, IBM on Monday unveiled a bundled offering for WebSphere Commerce Pro Suite which will allow its solution provider partners to offer an instant e-sourcing, e-commerce application. Corgel said the new offering will allow the WebSphere family to match solution providers' capabilities, letting them provide a robust application offering.

In addition, IBM announced a relationship with MarketMile, a Mountain View, Calif.-based e-procurement service provider.

Corgel said for clients with a market space from $100 million to $1 billion that are struggling with deferring and eliminating costs from their procurement services, the combination of IBM consulting and global services wrapped around MarketMile services improves Big Blue's footprint in the midmarket.

All the new services can either be resold by solution providers or repackaged as part of their own offerings, said Corgel.