While elaborating on IBM’s channel strategy and plans for 2021, Lata Singh, Director, Partner Ecosystem, IBM India and South Asia, in conversation with Amit Singh, reiterates the company’s efforts to re-strategize channels and partner programs during the pandemic, and its committed USD 1 billion investment globally
As businesses turned to work-from-home environment, how was the demand for security solutions impacted during 2020?
As remote working became the new norm, businesses continued to battle new security challenges while supporting the requirements of a large remote workforce. This trend resulted in a robust demand for IT security as highlighted in the global market study conducted by IDC last year. The report estimated the worldwide spending on security-related hardware, software, and services to be USD 125.2 billion, which is an increase of 6 percent over 2019. It also estimated the worldwide security spending to reach USD 174.7 billion in 2024 with a CAGR of 8.1 percent over the 2020-2024 forecast period.
Given the enterprise security scenario, businesses require a ‘Zero Trust’ security strategy which evolves with the changing landscape by:
- Increasing the efficacy of existing security controls by:
- Diligently prioritizing and monitoring all security alerts including fine-tuning the rules to address new requirements, like employees logging in at odd hours from different locations.
- Continued risk assessment and monitoring of both new and existing assets, which are exposed to the Internet to enable remote working.
- Creating awareness around ‘social engineering’ attacks through regular trainings and real-life examples.
- Investing in additional security controls especially around data and identity security since they are the most critical assets for any organisation.
- Breaking the siloed approach towards data security and threat management to quickly identify data breaches and contain them especially in a remote working model.
Looking at the challenges posed by Covid-19, how did you re-strategize channels and partner programs during the pandemic?
Like most businesses, our channel partners faced the twin dilemma of – providing seamless business continuity to minimize impact on their clients and ensuring continued skilling to respond to the dynamic client requirements.
In 2020, IBM committed USD 1 billion investment globally to help partners provide their clients with a seamless and secure journey to the cloud. In addition, to accelerate growth and innovation and to provide greater value to our partners globally, we introduced program enhancements and simplification including the launch of Hybrid Cloud Ecosystem, Partner World 2.0, Red Hat Marketplace and Industry Cloud Ecosystem.
In India, we witnessed an increased demand for cloud solutions, cyber security, remote workforce and business continuity planning. To enable our partners navigate through the changing business landscape, we introduced a range of new initiatives including:
- Digital resources like digital workshop, which provides access to key virtual selling, training and learning tools; and IBM Virtual Client Center, which provides 24/7 access to solutions, demos, webinars etc.
- Skills enablement programs like IBM Skills Gateway, which provides access to digital badges and professional certifications and Seismic portal, which offers a range of enablement materials on demand.
- Engagement solutions like My Digital Marketing, which is a no-cost digital collaboration platform offering ‘ready-to execute’ digital campaigns and Business Partner Connect, which offers both IBM and Red Hat partners the ability to discover new collaboration opportunities, by leveraging Watson’s matching technology to help them find the right tools for shifting business needs.
What is your future channel roadmap and plans?
We believe that an ecosystem of partners is essential to drive value for clients and to accelerate co-creation and co-innovation to bring the best platforms, products and services to the market. This platform-economy approach aligns with our ecosystem commitment and is well reflected through the dedicated ‘Build and Services’ track in our Partnerworld 2.0 program.
In 2021, we plan to unite with our ecosystem partners to deliver consistent client experiences and ‘get to market’ and ‘go to market’ their way through:
- Personalized partner experience through a single focal
- Alignment with IBM sellersto exclusively work with partners who will help them drive growth, identify opportunities and deals across Build, Service and Sell tracks
- Deep technical expertiseto help architect solutions using IBM technology
- Access to hybrid cloud build resourcesto design, build and/or migrate solutions with IBM systems and software technology
- Creating opportunities to drive demand and success through additional demand generation and cloud engagement funds, and digital campaigns to identify new opportunities based on client buying behaviours.
Keeping pace with the evolving market requirements and the convergence of AI, Cloud, IOT, Blockchain and 5G, we will expand our ecosystem to bring in the next generation of ‘non-traditional’ partners that are disrupting the industry while deepening our relationships and supporting our partners including Individual Software Vendors (ISVs) and Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to transform their client experiences.