The world’s leading technology companies are driving the AI revolution. Today, partnering with one of these companies can rapidly accelerate AI adoption. One company with a history of AI innovation that’s championing new opportunities for its partner ecosystem is IBM.
Raj Datta, vice president, independent software vendor (ISV) partnerships and technology partnerships at IBM, and Savio Rodrigues, IBM’S vice president, ecosystem engineering and developer advocacy, met with AI Index Report host and Acceleration Economy analyst Toni Witt to discuss their AI ecosystem strategy as part of the AI Ecosystem Course.
The discussion, with highlights below, covers the tech giant’s partner strategy, its watsonx AI and data platform, and how partners can help customers accelerate business results with AI.
Enhancing the Partner Experience
In January 2023, IBM officially launched its new partner program, IBM Partner Plus. Datta explained the approach: “What we’re really focused in on is some key areas, competitive incentives to ensure that partners are well incentivized in the IBM ecosystem,” he says. “We’re very big on education. So, we allow our partners to take a look at all the education material that our employees are using as well.”
Citing the work of Rodrigues’ team, Datta explained how IBM is helping build applications alongside other software companies, ensuring that IBM technology is solidly embedded into their solutions. And this approach extends to AI.
“We’ve opened up our entire watsonx portfolio,” says Datta. “We’ve opened up specific libraries just for our partners. We’ve created applications and APIs that have been developed by IBM Research solely for our partners. This is a very big difference than what you see, because these technologies are not offered to just anyone in the marketplace.
“If you think about the AI space, it’s a competitive race right now. And what our partners are looking for is that competitive advantage,” Datta continues. “What IBM’s able to do is really accelerate their adoption of AI, get that to the market. And once you have a solution ready for the market, I have an entire organization that will go out there and help you co-sell your solution.”
Enterprise-Ready AI
With its plethora of AI tools, IBM is positioned to help partners accelerate AI in their organizations. “When you think about some of the AI tasks around generation, summarization, entity extraction, sentiment analysis, all of those capabilities make the end user experience better through the ISV solution,” Rodrigues says. “ISVs have a choice. They can go build that AI themselves, or they can partner with the likes of IBM.
“Our view is that we’ve got thousands of researchers, engineers and so forth building those technologies for embedding use cases. So, it’s more efficient and it helps the ISV focus on their domain expertise by embedding our technologies.”
Yet, IBM sees partnerships as a two-way-street, fully recognizing the benefits of collaborating with domain experts. “We absolutely depend on partners because they have the domain expertise that we don’t have,” explains Rodrigues. “We can bring our capabilities around generative AI, and then we rely on our partners to have the domain expertise to drive that generative AI to solve a business problem for clients in a specific domain.”
Acceleration Economy analyst, and Paragon Films CIO, Kenny Mullican noted how IBM staked out early leadership with AI in the past, but then was relatively quiet and didn’t rush products to market upon the release of ChatGPT. He cites the methodical, ecosystem-oriented approach as a differentiator that positions the company to make major headway with customers.
“IBM had been quietly, at least from my perspective, working with lots of big players to build an entire ecosystem based on open source with a focus on collaboration, education, and governance to make sure responsible AI was being developed — AI that would repsect your private information, security, safety, and ethical use cases.” He adds that IBM continues to approach AI “with a level of maturity you don’t see from some of the big players.”
