Monday Morning Impact – February 22

IBM Redesigns PartnerWorld Program

IBM has rolled out a newly redesigned IBM PartnerWorld program designed to help deliver higher value to businesses and organizations in the cloud and cognitive era. The program is also designed to accelerate skills development they need to deliver value to clients, and rewards partners with more predictable performance incentives.

The newly-introduced “Skill Pack” provides education, support offerings, as well as a test voucher to aid in accelerating their time to market. Additionally, new competencies will be offered to channel partners to support their transition to growth areas with increased opportunities.

“Digital business combined with digital intelligence is fundamentally changing companies, professions and industries,” said Marc Dupaquier, General Manager, IBM Global Business Partners. “IBM is accelerating our transformation by helping Business Partners capture emerging business models, build deeper expertise and at the same time, broaden our reach to attract new Business Partners.”

The program now includes refined roadmaps designed to help build deeper expertise, offer guidance for building new capabilities in strategic growth areas, including cloud and cognitive computing, and helping to increase revenue opportunities for partners.

In addition to launching the redesigned PartnerWorld program, IBM is also rolling out a newly designed PartnerWorld University portal, web-based learning management system delivering education to Business Partners to help build sales and technical skills, with a broader repository of courses to allow them to gain new IBM certifications.

Channel Impact
Although IBM is certainly no stranger to indirect sales models, the evolving nature of go-to-market strategies in the era of cloud, managed services, IoT and other developments, makes it imperative that even companies with long-standing reputations in the industry continue to morph their channel programs in response to those shifts.

Avnet Joins the VMware Partner Professional Services Program

Phoenix-based distributor Avnet has joined the VMware Partner Professional Services Program (PPSP) as an Enterprise partner. This membership avails Avnet of a variety of services-focused training and related materials to support the sale and delivery of VMware solutions.

“Avnet already has strong VMware-certified capabilities and resources as they relate to software-defined enterprises, and our participation in this program further emphasizes our commitment to the success of our VMware partners,” said Mike Heintzelman, Avnet’s vice president of global suppliers. “The benefits of this program will positively augment our existing resources, and our team stands ever-ready to continue building on the success that we’ve enjoyed with VMware for more than a decade.”

Channel Impact
This designation doubles down on Avnet’s ability to support the sale and implementation of VMware offerings.

CounterPath Announces Channel Agreement with Ingram Micro

CounterPath Corporation, a Vancouver-based Unified Communications vendor, has signed a distribution agreement with Ingram Micro, covering the vendor’s over-the-top (OTT) communications solutions.

“The influence of consumer applications has radically changed the way small to extra-large enterprise workers communicate,” said Todd Carothers, EVP of marketing and products at CounterPath. “The old paradigm of vertical, vendor-led platforms is out the door and is rapidly being replaced by solutions that support any device, any platform over any network. We leverage this shift and do it in a way that secures voice, video, messaging, presence and collaboration all unified across a common user interface that is truly unique to CounterPath.”

CounterPath’s Bria softphone for desktop, tablet and mobile devices, together with Stretto Platform server solutions, enable enterprises, carriers and OEMs around the globe to offer unified over-the-top (OTT) communications experience across both fixed and mobile networks.

Channel Impact
The move is expected to help channel partners meet the demand for security-focused UC solutions.