IBM AI Offerings, Renewed Channel Program Position Partners For Growth: Channel Exec La Rose

In an interview with CRN at the IBM Think 2026 conference in Boston, David La Rose, IBM partner ecosystem and sales general manager, spoke about what new IBM offerings like IBM Bob and Watsonx Orchestrate mean for partners and how partners from recent acquisitions like Apptio, HashiCorp and Confluent fit into IBM’s channel plans.

AI developments, of course, dominated the agenda at last week’s IBM Think 2026 conference in Boston last week where the company debuted a number of critical new products and services for customers including the IBM Bob AI-powered development agent “partner,” the Watsonx Orchestrate agent control plane, and the IBM Sovereign Core for regulatory and governance controls.

These new capabilities, part of IBM’s “AI Operating Model” framework for making AI a core part of a business’s operations, are also critical for IBM’s legions of sell, build and service partners – both in terms of developing their own AI capabilities and in the expanded portfolios of technology they can offer their customers.

IBM, meanwhile, is reaping the benefits of the major overhaul of its partner operations the company undertook three years ago that resulted in the company’s current Partner Plus program. And now IBM is working to bring into its channel ecosystem the partners that worked with recent major acquisitions including Apptio, HashiCorp and Confluent.

At Think 2026, CRN sat down with David La Rose, general manager of the IBM partner ecosystem and sales, to catch up on what’s happening with IBM’s channel ecosystem, what the new AI-focused announcements mean for partners, and other topics. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

To start off, at a high level, what are your thoughts on where things stand right now with IBM and the channel?

It was in ‘23 when we launched Partner Plus. That was a complete rewrite of the [partner] program that we had at the time. And the essence of that was really setting the foundation for building, what I would say, is a consistent, growing software channel.

And so now that we’re three years into that, what’s happened? Obviously, IBM’s portfolio has evolved—talking about the software portfolio, obviously. By that stage we had brought in Red Hat, so you had the hybrid cloud offering, and we heard a little bit about that from Arvind today [CEO Arvind Krishna during a Think 2026 keynote speech during Partner Day].

But we’ve really augmented the rest of the automation and data portfolio with some of our newer acquisitions: Apptio, Cloudability [acquired by Apptio before the IBM acquisition], we’ve had HashiCorp come in, and some of the smaller acquisitions, like WebMethods, DataStax and Confluent, it really has augmented the overall portfolio.

We’ve evolved the program because these acquisitions are really SaaS players. We’ve continued to see many of the partners move from buying on-premises and in-perpetuity-type contracts and moving into SaaS and subscription licenses. In fact, in the last 12 months, the full year ‘25 we saw SaaS growing in the mid-20 [percent] through the channel in the resale motion, and we saw subscription license in excess of 60-percent growth.

So that was the impetus for us to then look at changing and adjusting our software incentive stack and partner earning potential as we came into 2026. We launched that early in January. We made some changes to our program earlier this year, and that was really in two areas. One was, as we brought these acquisitions in, we really wanted to have them integrated into our Partner Plus program with a really clear view that partners earnings can be maximized through selling SaaS and subscription licenses and selling it into what we call the dedicated segment.

The other thing that was really important for us is, we announced what we call the Adopt incentive. And this is important because it really goes to the heart of the service players, which were really the, you know, the partners that came in from HashiCorp, the partners that came in with Apptio, the partners that will come in from Confluent. They’re really making the majority of their money through the services of deploying software, driving consumption—and that was the differentiation that we put in place this year.

So there’s significant earning potential for those players and we can really meet them where they are in the market. Our job, from an ecosystem perspective, is to enable and set the stage for our partners to be able to take advantage of what’s going on with AI. And so everything that we do in and around the program, as well as the technical support that we provide, is centered around providing this platform for them to take advantage of.

What is the relationship between IBM’s partner ecosystem and the IBM Consulting business? Is there much overlap there? What’s the synergy?

I think there’s overlap, there’s synergy, and the partners sort of find their own way. So what do I mean by that? In the partner ecosystem, the business that Kareem [channel chief Kareem Yusuf IBM senior vice president, ecosystem, strategic partners & initiatives] leads, it’s really the core channel that we’re operating with there. You’ve got the resale players, you’ve got the ISVs that are building with the IBM product portfolio. And then the last thing you heard him talk about is our service partners, where it’s all about how they influence the technology decisions associated with the clients that they’re working on.

IBM Consulting actually engages with a lot of our service partners, and engages with a lot of our resale partners, where they may subcontract and maybe work with them to augment the advisory services that [IBM] Consulting provides.

But I’ve got to say, having been in this area for the best part of a decade, there really isn’t conflict. Partners figure out where they can bring value. And IBM Consulting brings partners in where they see that.

During the Partner Day keynotes at Think 2026 there was a fair amount of discussion of AI by design and sovereign AI. Talk about those.

What we talk about in terms of sovereign by design is providing the elements we’ve been talking about, the hybrid cloud—where you’re running the data—and the AI models are going to be sovereign-ready, if you like. So clients’ data is protected and will stay where it’s sourced.

From a developer side of things, you’ll hear a lot more about IBM Bob [the AI-powered agentic development assistant and IDE introduced at Think 2026]. Really, the best way to describe it is an AI-powered development partner for developers today, at the enterprise base. It helps enterprises and clients accelerate how they deliver, how they modernize legacy systems. And it’s got a very strong and secure interface that’s associated with it. We put it into beta test in June [2025], just for IBMers. And I think, now, we’ve got over 100,000 users inside the company.

Going back to the overall growth of AI, there’s been some talk of an AI slowdown. What are you seeing and what kind of advice do you have for channel partners in terms of where things stand? Are you seeing any concerns among IBM’s partners about where things are going and whether there might be a slowdown?

Our job is to provide the best possible technology and an environment for [partners] to be able to be successful, build businesses and, obviously, maximize their earning potential associated with everything around AI.

What we hear and see from our partners is, this is moving extraordinarily aggressively and we don’t see any slowdown. If I give you a couple of examples, Ernst and Young, if I go back and look at the topic of IBM Bob, Ernst and Young are using that to accelerate modernization of their global tax platform and they are refactoring and testing at the moment and going through additional documentation rewrites.

So, look, this is not slowing down in any way, shape or form. And again, I keep harping on IBM Bob, but if I just look at the scale, internally, of how that’s augmenting the development at the enterprise space, I think what we’re seeing is [customers] moving away from AI experiments and basic productivity gains to how do they really accelerate [new software] delivery, getting from an idea into production faster. And that’s across design and coding, testing, how you enable modernization of legacy platforms.

A really important element is around embedding security. IBM Bob identifies vulnerabilities very early with integrated secure code capabilities. And then it has to adapt to workflows, so it’s got context, it’s context aware, and so you can customize across existing environments.

So no, this is not slowing down. This is not slowing down. Just anecdotally, if you look at what’s going on in the infrastructure side, just across the hyperscalers, the commitments that they’re making in terms of infrastructure and data center buildouts, its not slowing down anytime soon.

There has been a lot of buzz at Think 2026 about the new Watson X Workshop, the technical training session for developers and IT professionals for building and deploying AI models using the Watsonx platform. What does this mean for partners?

Very new platform, built on the Watsonx infrastructure. We’re using it internally. Think about this as a platform where you decide how you want to learn. It will curate the content based on how you want it delivered. It could be through podcasts, it could be through documentation, it could be through video.

And we will bring this to our partners in the early part of the second half [of 2026], summertime this year, where they’ll be able to self-curate everything that they need to know, whether it’s around technology and the portfolio that we’ve got, whether it’s around their Partner Plus program, and it will really unlock how they how they interact with us.

While AI is, obviously, at the top of everyone’s agenda today, are there any other major trends among the IBM partner base right now, such as the economy or geopolitical concerns?

I think the partners are constantly, looking at how they can expand their businesses and how they can drive more services around the [product] portfolio or the solutions that they’re offering. So, again, I think we are best placed right now for a couple of reasons. We have a portfolio that addresses both infrastructure and software. As you said, it’s augmented with consulting as necessary. And we’ve got an AI platform that is enterprise ready.

And then from a program perspective, it’s meeting them where they are. So if they are a new partner from an acquisition that’s coming in: Apptio HashiCorp, Confluent, then, you know, there’s earning capability for them. If they’ve been with us for multiple decades—and we built our Power [servers] and our storage partner channel decades ago—then they continue to be the strongest partners that we have in the network. So it’s all about how they continue to differentiate their own capability.

How much are the acquisitions of Apptio, HashiCorp and Confluent adding to IBM’s partner base? Is this changing the overall look of the IBM partner ecosystem?

I would say all three of those acquisitions—and I’ve been with them through the due diligence phase [of the acquisitions] all the way through to transfer of business—have very fast-growing SaaS products [that were] fairly early in their in their life as an offering. So they had fairly nascent [channel] ecosystems. [They had] relatively immature partner programs [and] opportunistic partner relationships.

What we’re now doing is giving them access to the structure, the earning framework and the support mechanisms that we have in the very mature IBM channel program. To give you an example, they have transparency on their earning potential. They didn’t have that under their [previous programs]. They’ve got clarity on how they can earn money and what that looks like. We differentiate their earnings through their skill sets. We bring a lot of value.

But then, I think most importantly, we give them access to what you heard Arvin (CEO Krishna] talk about, which is the long tail of clients. We haven’t talked about that here, but if you think about how IBM goes to market, we have direct relationships with about 500 of the top clients. Everything else is partner led. So what we’re seeing is, as these new acquisitions come into the IBM partner program, they really have unlimited access to clients working with IBM and so, you know, unlimited [sales] lead pipeline that they can work on with us.

And skills development opportunities?

We give them access to our own developers. And we’ve got very structured skills programs that they can take advantage of and help scale their business. So we give them access to scale.

Anything else to add about IBM and its partners?

We’re pretty excited with where we’ve got to in the last three years, [including the] complete reinvention of our program. As I said, the original objective here was to build a consistently growing software channel. And I think we exited 2025 with that very much in place. And now you layer into that the continued acquisitions and integrations that we have—Confluent being the next one—and the framework that we’re offering our partners, I think we’ve got a perfect setup for partners to be successful in an AI and hybrid world.