Honest advice from a successful IBM partner!

Earlier this week I hosted one of our ISV Leadership Forum events at our IBM Innovation Center in Silicon Valley.  As part of the event we covered how partners can best leverage all of IBM investments in Smarter Cities, Smarter Analytics and Cloud Computing. Special thanks to all our partners who attended! As often occurs, the highlight of the event was when we had a partner share their experiences and advice in these areas for other’s to learn from.

This week we were thrilled to have Meghan Keough, VP of Marketing and Product Management at SignalDemand join us. If you don’t know SignalDemand — check them out, they have a very cool solution that leverages big data and predictive analytics to provide insights and optimization for commodity based value chains. Said simply – they help clients drive higher profit margins through better pricing, supply and volume decisions.

When Meghan spoke and was asked what advice she would give to other partners who want to work with IBM – she gave three tips:

1.  Adopt IBM Software where it makes sense for your business as an ISV. IBM has a ton of solutions that you can embed or leverage in your own company’s software solution, and you should take advantage of what IBM has to offer.
2. Get working on joint sales right away and bring some deals to the table. The quickest way to get the partnership going is to bring some deals to IBM and put some joint wins on the board. In doing so, IBM quickly engaged and began bringing SignalDemand into key opportunities that IBM was uncovering.
3. Be patient and keep working across IBM — once you get the gearbox working it’s a huge engine. Megan pointed out that IBM goes to market in three ways – by industry, by product/solution, and by “big plays.” Getting connected to leaders and sellers in all these areas helps drive success — and you have to keep working it given how large IBM is in the market. While it might take awhile, it pays off once you get the engine running!

I always love great advice from a partner that is honest and direct. Thanks Meghan for helping our partners learn how to be even more successful!

The BIG opportunities — and the IBM Recipe Book for Success

Despite all the hype about the big opportunities that exist in the IT marketplace – and the debate about how BIG the big data opportunity is, or how quickly the mobile revolution will overtake us, or how the cloud transformation will cause all sorts of problems to rain down on IT systems (see Steve Wozniak’s comments), or how cities need to become Smarter Cities to better handle the massive urbanization that is taking place around the globe, everyone agrees these are big opportunities for IBM and our partners to help clients transform their business.

As you would expect, IBM needs a broad range of partners to help us deliver solutions and services to clients in all of these areas – and we’re very focused on make it simple and clear to partners where the best opportunities are — and how partners can work with us in each of these areas.  We have thousands of client wins in these areas and most of them involve partners as part of the client value equation.

This week I’ll be at our Silicon Valley Innovation Center talk about these BIG opportunities and laying out the partnering receipe book for success.  I’ll be hosting our ISV Leadership Forum that is open to partners and software vendors from all across the Valley and I look forward to seeing many new partners at the event!   It’s a great opportunity for you to come and learn from other partners who have found great success in teaming with IBM!

If you want to attend — here’s the info and registration page.

I hope to see you there!