Mukul Mathur
Director - Business Partners & CSI
IBM India South Asia
Post 100 years celebration, how is IBM looking at the Indian market?
As we go forward, you must have observed us continue to grow and build our focus in the high-value space of products and services for our clients. The IBM published its "2015 Roadmap" to analysts and claimed that there are four core areas across the globe which would be the primary growth drivers for IBM. They fit into our strategic strengths and the capabilities that we have. These four strategic areas are Analytics, Cloud, Smarter Planet and Geo-expansion. We believe there is a huge opportunity in the new era where customers are looking for vendors like IBM to put it together, which is to get inside from huge data that is getting generated. That is where the analytic comes. The second one is Cloud which is a new computing model, which caters to the fast-changing enterprise requirements of today. So no longer the enterprises have the luxury of waiting for applications to develop and deploy over a long period of time. It is about flexible and tailored computing both private and public infrastructure. The third one "Smarter Planet" is about making every device for every part of the business intelligent and interconnected because its IT is going beyond the traditional IT infrastructure. Last but not the least is Geo expansion which is about growth being coming from cities and segments which were not the traditional large cities but new geographies. Thus, at a global level, countries like BRIC and India will form part of the geo expansion strategy. In the country like India, the cities, apart from the topmost cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Chennai, would form potential areas of growth for us.
What is the market you are eyeing at? What is the role of channel partners for IBM?
These are the four strategic areas where IBM believes market opportunities would drive growth. All these areas are partner centric. They all have huge elements starting from solution which typically comes from ISVs or solutions from application developers, whether it is Analytics, Cloud or Smarter Planet or Geo expansion. We require application, solution that starts with the partnership with ISVs and then there are SIs and infrastructure solution providers who actually build solutions or implementations around any of these areas using IBM technologies. Particularly in things like geo expansion, partners provide the reach and the client relationship to be able to address those requirements. Each of these four areas has the huge opportunity for us to work with our partners and vice versa to leverage these opportunities because there are a lot of complimentary things that bring to the table.
From Product to Solution provider, how did you help your partners evolve?
In the scenario, you can see that IBM is looking at providing value to its customers through its partners. This whole transformation also requires parallelly for our partners skill-set and capabilities to transition and transform to align with this requirement. If partners are made traditional resellers of only hardware or traditional sellers of only software or have primarily work with client on the basis of relationships with CIOs, therefore all those to a certain extent are still valid but increasingly more and more business moves towards or the customer moves towards the solution based buying some of those skill sets are not sufficient anymore for our partners to be successful in retaining those clients or capturing the new domain opportunity. A lot of these opportunities, for example, will emerge from the CFO or the CEO office and in many cases we find these opportunities emerge from chief marketing officers such as "Analytics". Since the buyer is changing and the buyer's expectations are changing from the entity that they want to partner with, we believe it requires our partners to also transition and transform their skills and capabilities in that area.
How are you strengthening your channel and opening avenues for them, especially during large deployments?
One way of doing is to acquire the solution capability which is to get trained in the solution areas that you want to represent. So if our partner who has been just selling hardware realized the importance of selling collaboration and marketing solutions, then we have to work with them and re-skill them to have intelligent discussions with their customers. We have a very structured programme with our resellers as well as system integrators, distributors about skilling them in the products and the tools that they would require to be familiar with to be able to be credible to their clients, also in terms of monitoring them, implementing them so that they can build delivery skills around solutions whether it is power, storage, eCommerce, Tivoli or middleware. So there are different partners who are engaging at different levels of expertise. This is one dimension of enabling and building capabilities. The second dimension is having the business discussion with the C level executive in a client's organization. It is a little beyond the technical discussion with a CIO. While interacting with CMO the conversation includes how to get market insight, how to analyze market segment. CFO would like the conversation to cover the cache flow saving or what is the RoI of the particular investment? What kind of saving they can look? Added to this is the partners' need to hire and manage talent which is different from what they have been doing in the past.
Any new initiative rolled out for the enablement of channel? What are your expectations from it?
We realized that there is a need for IBM to work with its partners, to bring in a programme that addresses the second pillar as much as we do the first pillar and that is the genesis of why we thought of coming out with such an innovative programme. We wanted to start up with the CEOs of our partner CEO and did it in collaboration with IIM, Bangalore whose faculty combined concept from the management institute perspective and case study etc. but also a very relevant context to the IBM business. We developed the curriculum and ran our first programme called "IBM Grand Masters Series" last quarter. We believe from every feedback we got that this is something that the partners really felt brought huge value to them. We chose to do the first programme with our Geo expansion partners who work outside the top metros the reason being metro partners have sufficient access as compared to our Geo partners. We started from where we thought it should be more impactful. We believe that the biggest value for the partners is that they become more credible in front of their clients in terms of not just addressing the technology but overall business issues and then running their own business more efficiently.
This initiative has been started in India and tailored and built for our marketplace. But now it is going to be taken to other parts as a best practice.
