Ibm software value incentive program

Hardware remains a big part of many IBM partners' businesses, and several channel partners want to learn more about IBM's plans for its PureSystems converged infrastructure servers. On the hardware side, it's a big focus for us," said Yenke at Lighthouse, which has nine PureSystems certified employees. But some partners said that sales of PureSystems, introduced nearly a year ago, have been slower than IBM had hoped.

IBM's hardware sales have been on a slow decline for some time. In , hardware sales plunged 13 percent in the third quarter but stabilized in the fourth quarter , dropping just 1 percent and actually increasing 4 percent when factoring out the company's retail store systems sold to Toshiba in August.

This is generous of IBM, which usually keeps the biggest and most profitable deals for its own inside sales teams. IBM also announced it was making available to partners an array of training and certification programs around cloud computing, one of the hottest areas of IT right now. Under the new cloud architecture certification, IBM will vouch that certificate holders can design public and private cloud computing solutions based on IBM software.

So, why cloud computing? IBM says it decided to incentivize the cloud as the result of the new Global Business Partner Profitability Survey it recently commissioned the Ronin Corporation to put together. Another 50 percent say consulting services is their top cloud opportunity.

And I believe it's going to bring a lot of value to all of us in IBM also hopes the new rebates will encourage channel partners to work together: Those that primarily resell hardware can pool their expertise and resources with partners with software expertise to create higher-value systems, Mills said.

And VADs can likewise leverage the rebates to pull together teams of solution providers to build more complete systems. To encourage partners to make sales referrals for IBM cloud services, partners that provide referrals for IBM's Intelligent Operations Cloud Center and Smarter Commerce cloud applications will be rewarded with 15 percent of the value of annual subscriptions.

As dawns, SVI should be offered in multiple languages and the global rollout should be complete, he said. Here are the latest Insider stories. More Insider Sign Out. Sign In Register. Sign Out Sign In Register.