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.

A quick update on Smarter Utilities

This week we announced the results of another smart grid pilot project here in North Carolina.  IBM and our partner Consert worked to install energy management devices on specific appliances at each location – such as hot water heaters, pool pumps, HVAC, etc.  – to give consumers the ability match the device power consumption to their use.   For example – why not turn off the hot water heater when no one is home all day!

The pilot was run for 100 residential and business customers of the Fayetteville Public Works Commission, the local utility.  The result – customers were able to reduce their consumption by ~20% in the first month!

Here’s a good overview at the NY Times Green Inc Blog – check it out!

Why Bother?

So as I start my blog, many close colleagues in the industry have asked the ever important and sometimes dreaded  “Why….?” question.   Since that is one of my favorite questions for all parts of life — I thought it would be worth answering as the starting point for our discussion.

So why start this blog?  As I reflected on this over the past few weeks I think it comes down to three key areas –

1) To help facilitate a discussion of good ideas and examples within the IT industry – and within the ecosystem of the broader business community that we are all part of.

2) To share ideas and observations from the intersection of sales, marketing, partnerships, and general management in hi-tech and other industries.

3) To listen and learn from all my colleagues and partners around the world in these areas and to discuss related topics in international business, travel, culture, work-life balance, social media, the role of business in society and other relevant topics for our networks.

In my current role at IBM Developer Relations, I have the privilege of working key software, technology, and venture capital partners all around the world.  Each interaction presents an opportunity for insights and learning – and for the conversation to continue.  I hope that you will join me in the discussion – here on this blog, via Twitter, and in person at every chance we get.