IBM Global Services Partnering Efforts Draw Mixed Reviews

Last year, IBM said it planned to invest $300 million to help business partners grow services and consulting opportunities in SMB accounts. Among the offerings were a sales agent programs for IGS delivered services in hosting and strategic outsourcing. Additionally, IGS vowed to partner more closely with regional systems integrators to jointly go after opportunities in the SMB market.

“At the end of the day we don’t have a hugely positive track record with business partners, and we’ve worked hard over last 12-18 months to change that,” said Kevin Hooper, who was named to the newly created position of director of worldwide channel marketing and enablement for IGS five months ago

He noted that in part because of the initiatives launched at last year’s PartnerWorld, IGS’s channel business more than doubled last year.

Joe Mertens, executive vice president of Sirius Computer Solutions, an IBM business partner in San Antonio, Tex., said his IGS business is up 54 percent year over year, primarily through sales of IGS delivered services to the SMB market. “If I look in the SMB space, I’d say IGS has gotten [business partner] religion, he said. “But outside of SMB, there’s work to be done. It’s hard to say [in larger accounts] where we partner and where we compete.”

But Scott Severson, vice president of Berbee Information Networks, an IBM business partner in Madison, Wis., said the IGS developed services aimed at the SMB market sometimes conflict with business partners who have developed and offer similar services. “For those partners that are services oriented, it’s direct competition,” he said.

Severson said that Berbee does sometimes subcontract out to IGS when it finds a services opportunity but doesn’t have enough services people on the bench to fulfill the contract. “But IGS typically takes a 30 to 40 percent uplift in price [compared to what Berbee would charge], and that’s not competitive.”

But Hooper vowed to fix the problem.

“There are too many opportunities out there in SMB to at a minimum be complimentary to each other and in the best case to leverage [business partner] skills and put them in the Authorized Delivery Program and hopefully address the situation where it’s competitive,” he said.

The Authorized Delivery Program includes a group of business partners who have established a skills profile with IGS and commit to an annual sales volume for IGS services.

“From our perspective this is a volume business [SMB services] for us,” Hooper said. “We want to get as many customers as we can and if that means we have to sharpen the pencil [to lower IGS rates] then we will sharpen the pencil.”

Hooper said, IGS’s Authorized Delivery Program is in pilot mode but already includes about 180 business partners worldwide, about two thirds of which are in the U.S.