IBM Global Entrepreneur Schedule for 2011 – and Five Keys to Success

Just a bit ago we unveiled the schedule for the IBM Global Entrepreneur program events in 2011 – and you can find all the details here.  It’s going to be an exciting year ahead – with the program launching in more countries this year, and Smartcamps coming to nine cities!   Our competitions will span the globe – encompassing five continents – with the kickoff in India and the final event in Rio.  Be sure to check out the schedule and apply to the program!

As we work with hundreds of start up partners around the globe – it’s fascinating to look at what makes them successful as companies, and as entrepreneurs.    This week I read an interesting perspective titled “Should You Be An Entrepreneur” that looked closely at the types of entrepreneurs and what makes them successful.   It’s a fascinating quick read that you should check out.  The five keys to being successful – ability to change, ability to delegate, understanding the market they serve, managing cashflow, and imagination.

IBM’s New Cloud Partner Program – Day 2 Thoughts

Yesterday I had the pleasure of unveiling our IBM Cloud Partner program at our Partnerworld Leadership event in Orlando – and judging by the early feedback and press it’s looking like a hit!

We all know Cloud is a big opportunity – and as a new delivery model it has serious implications for every type of partner in the ecosystem. Because of the breadth of our IBM strategy, we had quite a challenge to develop the right single partner program to enable all of our partners to take advantage of this opportunity and accelerate their success in the marketplace.   Our IBM strategy spans building private clouds for clients, enabling cloud builders, operators and integrators with our technologies and solutions for the cloud, partnering deeply with cloud application providers, and building our public cloud business process solutions such as Lotuslive (which now has more than 18 million users!).

As you can imagine – enabling these various business models requires a range of capabilities and certifications.  The good news is that for many partners, they are seeing a lot of value in the cloud sales and technical training classes we provide to help them hone their selling, and their solution engagements with clients.   Given our experience from executing thousands of cloud projects around the globe in the past year – it’s a privilege to harvest all those engagements for learnings and insight we are now sharing with partners in these programs.

It has been great to see some of our best partners here this week.  Last night I finally was able to meet Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM – and was encouraged to find out he is a fellow Domer!  SugarCRM and Lotuslive now have a great connection in the cloud – be sure to check it out if you haven’t seen it.  And Feyzi Fatehi is here too from Corent Technology. For all our application partners – if you are dealing with the decision of how to get to a multi-tenant model be sure you talk to Feyzi and his team – they have a solution to quickly transform single-tenant software applications into multi-tenant SaaS solutions without rewriting the existing application.