IBM has revamped its channel partner strategy to beef up revenues and align itself to emerging technology trends such as cloud, IoT, analytics, mobile and social.

The tech giant has adopted a three-pronged strategy that includes enriching, enabling and engaging with its channel partners to transform them from ‘resellers’ to ‘solution providers’.

“Traditionally, customers have looked at partners as resellers and not as solutions providers who can contribute with critical insights to their businesses. Today, customers for our marketing software solution, for instance, are CMOs not CIOs, who don’t really care about the bits and bytes of the software.

“They are not looking for resellers of licences but, for partners who can add value by running targeted marketing promotion campaigns for them, providing analytics of social profiles, gauging brand preferences of their end customers and so on,” Mukul Mathur, Vice-President – Global Business Partners and System Integrators, IBM India and South Asia, told BusinessLine.

Elaborating on the new strategy, Mathur said enriching partners is about helping them build rich capabilities, solutions and services for IBM’s cognitive and cloud offerings.

Enabling partners is about offering building blocks such as APIs (application programming interface), which partners use to combine IBM offerings along with their competencies to provide value added solutions to customers.

For example, Comsense, an IBM partner executed a targeted customer marketing campaign to help Meru Cabs take on competition, using the IBM Marketing Cloud.

Engaging, is all about helping partners go-to-market by facilitating one-to-many and one-to-one interactions through industry specific programmes, where partners get to interact with potential customers across verticals.

Shedding its earlier partner programme, the company completely changed its Partner Tier structure in January to include Silver, Gold and Platinum level partners.

The 400+ Silver, Gold and Platinum partners, qualify not just by the volumes of business they generate but for their competencies and client references.

Asked what percentage of IBM India and South Asia’s business is from channel partners, Mathur, without revealing numbers, said: “Majority of our business in the hardware and software domain is partner-driven. However, our commercial segment, which constitutes business from SMEs and mid-market, is 100 per cent channel-led and a large part of our enterprise segment is also channel-led.”

As a part of IBM’s PartnerWorld programme, an umbrella programme for channel partners from around the globe, the company has attracted over 9,500 registrations from interested entities in India and South Asia alone. “We have 300 partners who work with us on SaaS solutions, one-third of them came to us in the last six months. We began this transformation journey in mid-2014 and are pumping business today,” said Mathur.