What is IBM’s strategy on the AWS Marketplace?

With the AWS Marketplace, our resell partners are able to take their clients’ committed spend with AWS against the IBM products that are with the AWS Marketplace.

Historically, where our partners may have come up against, ‘We have this committed spend, and we’re not really sure how to bring all of these things together?’

Our resale partners can now use that committed spend through the AWS Marketplace with the IBM products. So that becomes another way in which they can go to market.

So they actually really love it because they use it in other areas of their business. It makes it more seamless for them to sell the IBM portfolio.

We’re excited about the partnership. As a company, we are all-in on the ecosystem.

We have declared our ecosystem as one of our three strategic priorities and the AWS partnership is a critical piece of that as we think about: reaching new clients, adding more value to our existing clients, and continuing to add value for our partners as well.

There’s no better time to be an IBM partner and that is, in part, because of these type of relationships and the AWS partnership.

How important is IBM’s partnership with AWS and what are the opportunities for partners right now?

The client is at the center of everything that we do—that’s the premise of the relationship.

Because as we think about how we meet our clients where they’re at, if you take [our banking customer] Inter, for example—big relationship with IBM, big relationship with AWS—but what we were able to do with IBM and AWS going together to them is so much more.

So that was all about meeting Inter where they were at. They had strong relationships with both of us, but we were able to get more done and provide more value to them doing it together.

As we think about where we want to meet our clients and where we’re going to add the most value to them, we want to really lean into this AWS relationship.

As we put more SaaS products and more software products onto the AWS Marketplace, it’s also about where our clients want to buy and where they want to consume their products.

That’s also why, as we evolved how our resellers can also use the AWS Marketplace, it’s all about meeting our clients where they want and how they want to buy. We want to continue to evolve this partnership to be around our clients and what they need.