Kieron Allen interviews Kate Woolley, general manager, IBM Ecosystem, as part of the Acceleration Economy Partners Ecosystem Innovation series, in which he speaks with top executives responsible for the ecosystem businesses of the Cloud Wars Top 10 companies.
In this discussion, Woolley details how co-creation is essential for innovation, enabling IBM to deliver tailored solutions through a collaborative approach that integrates AI and hybrid cloud technologies.
Highlights
Co-Creation vs. Co-Selling (00:58)
IBM’s clients operate in an environment where digital transformation is necessary to stay ahead of the competition. There’s no one vendor that can meet all of those digital transformation needs. Partners are reselling technology, creating services, and building solutions. One size doesn’t really fit with all of its partners.
Co-creation paves the way for innovation and value creation, but co-selling is still incredibly important. One area where co-creation and co-selling come together is around IBM’s embeddable AI portfolio. This is helping partners to innovate and get their AI-powered products to market faster.
IBM is co-creating with Dun & Bradstreet to embed watsonx to help improve its workflows and also co-selling with them around solutions such as U.S. procurement. There are also smaller-scale companies like Make Music Count, an education startup, which has also embedded watsonx.
Cloud and AI Convergence (04:18)
AI and hybrid cloud are two pillars of its strategy. They’re coming closer and closer together. From a cloud perspective, there’s little debate that hybrid cloud is the prevalent IT environment. As AI becomes increasingly more widely deployed, one can see that hybrid cloud and AI are somewhat two sides of the same coin. IBM believes that a hybrid environment is the foundation for scaling AI.
Many IBM clients view multi-cloud as the best setup for their cloud ROI and to enable their generative AI deployments. The combination allows IBM to deliver that personalization at scale while also doing a lot of innovation.
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Partner Plus Program Success
Partner Plus is a big step in terms of delivering against its mission to grow with partners around hybrid cloud and AI — all built around the skills of IBM’s partners, but also meeting its clients where they are.
Partner Plus brings together all the pieces of its program into a single integrated ecosystem. IBM had over 1,500 new partners come into the program since it launched. It’s increased its technical resources by 3x. It’s seeing its partners engage in that skilling.
It’s sharing deals in a fast way so that it can get deals into the hands of its partners. The company reduced that time by over 70%, and it’s introduced partners into over 40,000 deals valued at over $5 billion.
AI Trust (08:11)
Trust is critical. It’s a major part of IBM’s complete AI strategy and how the company thinks about its product portfolio from an AI perspective. As AI is being considered, governance becomes the final gate that IBM clients go through to accelerate deployment. “We’re seeing a lot of our clients not be able to get their workloads into production because they’re worried about that risk,” she noted.
“When we look at some of the data, we’ve found that over 40% of enterprises, while they’re exploring or experimenting with AI, they’ve not yet deployed those models because of some of these challenges — skills, complexity, but very importantly, that trust aspect.” This also translates to how IBM’s partners engage with its products, portfolio, and clients.
IBM has indexed heavily on the element of trust. The company considers how to build trusted and transparent AI models as well as how it can mitigate issues around explainability, fairness, privacy, and the robustness of the models and AI workloads. It’s seeing a lot of engagement around the trust and governance elements of its portfolio.
Partnerships (11:09)
Microsoft and AWS are some of IBM’s most critical strategic partnerships. These are such strong partnerships because they revolve around meeting clients where they are and focus on delivering the most for clients.
Co-creation, co-selling, and GenAI are top of mind when it comes to working with partners. IBM’s watsonx portfolio is available on Microsoft Azure. They’re working together to determine how to further integrate IBM’s GenAI offerings. With its AWS partnership, the watsonx.governance is integrated with Amazon SageMaker, making it easier for customers to access and transform the data they’re using in their GenAI projects.
“Another big element of these partnerships is how we engage with their marketplaces, which are so critically important for their strategies but also for IBM’s strategy,” Woolley explained. They consider which technologies are complementary to determine how to approach this. IBM has over 30 offerings available on the Mircosoft Azure marketplace. With the entire watsonx platform along with other IBM software, IBM has 44 products available on the AWS marketplace.
IBM also collaborates with Red Hat OpenShift on Microsoft and AWS as it supports its clients on their hybrid cloud journeys.
Final Thoughts (14:00)
Co-creation and co-selling are vital in the business landscape. From an IBM perspective, businesses can’t deal with a single vendor to meet their needs; one size doesn’t fit all. Co-creation is helping drive IBM’s ability to address the needs of customers. If you want to meet the needs of your customers, you need to work collaboratively.
