IBM strengthens partner engagement

IBM has rolled out Channel Yatra, a new initiative to strengthen its engagement with partners, highlighting the solution-centric approach to enable partners to deliver greater value to their customers. Channel Yatra is a highly effective initiative that builds business partner interface, optimize IBM channel marketing and enhance Business Partner incentives across the brands.

This Channel Yatra started in the month of August 2012, in which the leadership team of STG group met over 70 key Business Partner CEOs in 8 cities including Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Pune, Chennai, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad and Kolkata.

With this, IBM reiterated its commitment to the partner ecosystem, focus on strategic program to increase partner profitability as well as highlight the concept of solution bundles that help channel partners sell and position their products better.

Speaking to The DQ Week, Sundar N Balasubramanian, country manager, STG channels, SI & ISV, IBM India South Asia said, "IBM addressed the key concerns of partners in the tier-2 & 3 cities by providing assistance in deep technical sales skills, lead generation, sales transaction progression, training and certification in order to facilitate growth. During the Channel Yatra, we have highlighted the solution-in-a-box approach to enable our business partners on value sale and customized solutions. These include solutions like VDI-In-a-Box, High Capacity CCTV Solution, AIX Scholar Program, DataCenter-in-a-Box and Compiler Server for Developers among others. IBM hardware optimized for 15 such sales plays were one of the key highlights of this initiative."

In this Yatra, they will be covering 16 cities and meeting with 140 Business Partner CEOs, wherein in the second phase, the company will further add 20 more cities. This platform helped business partners to discover collaborative ways to work with IBM, tap into IBM's technology resources for better product positioning as well as benefit from various incentives that are in store. IBM's offering for business partners in the areas of cloud computing, business analytics and Smarter Planet solutions were also among the key focus areas.

Additionally, IBM is also building internal brand and technical team to work closely with these business partners to form deeper engagements with them.