'We believe in profitable and sustainable business relationship with our partners.'

What are the highlights of IBM's channel strategy?

Our channel strategy revolves around enabling business partners to act as

technology consultants for end-customers. This provides IBM with enough

bandwidth to tackle customer's business issues and address them with

state-of-the-art products and solutions.

We undertake a variety of initiatives to make this happen. Skill building,

alignment of business partners with specific market segment and facilitating

inclusion of solutions in the business partner's portfolio of offerings are some

of the many activities that we initiated last year to execute the strategy.

We believe in profitable and sustainable business relationship with our

partners. We respect the business needs of our channel partners and have

tailor-made several programs to meet them.

What technology and marketing trends are you observing among the channels

in recent times?

This year, we have seen channel partners attempting to expand their product

portfolio to meet their customers' end-to-end IT requirements. While skills and

competencies remain core issues to contend with, efforts are clearly directed

towards scaling up the value chain. We welcome these trends since no company in

the IT industry is as suited to cater to end-to-end customer requirements as IBM

is.How are you going to strengthen your channel strategy keeping in mind the

current slowdown?

We believe that in the enterprise systems and software group space, the

business partners are the key influencers for end-customers making technology

decisions.

As indicated earlier, our strategy is to develop our business partners as

technology consultants to the customers. From this year on we will be putting in

resources to implement this strategy.

This means that we will continue to invest in skills, in forming alliances

and in launching marketing programs to reach out to the customers with specific

offerings. And in doing so we will be able to help our business partners run a

profitable and sustainable business.

What are the changes that IBM has incorporated to improve its

acceptability among channel partners?

IBM is committed to significantly increase the channel business in its

revenue yield through various routes to market. To achieve a much higher channel

participation, IBM India made fundamental structural changes in the beginning of

the year. These changes involved transformation of our business strategy to make

it 'business partner-led'.

We also set up channel marketing as a discipline in IBM to look after our

business partners needs from a marketing perspective.

How do you perceive the state of the distribution market and VAR business

in India?

The distribution market in India has seen phenomenal growth in low-value

products, like, printers, peripherals and even PCs. However distribution should

gear up to the needs of the value-add business.

Efforts have already begun, evident by the setting up of separate divisions

to cater to the value-add business by many distributors. These efforts are in

the right direction and will eventually lead us to an optimal way to cover the

market with low cost of operations.

VARs are relatively young in the market compared to their system integrator

counterparts. The mushrooming of the VARs dovetails well with the value-added

initiatives of the distributors. We however believe that focus and skills will

be the key differentiators.

Can you tell us more about IBM's alliance with Cisco? How is it going to

affect your channel?

IBM India and Cisco Systems' alliance is a part of the global alliance formed

between the two companies in 1999. This composed of a $2-billion technology

agreement, a strategic relationship with IBM Global Services and the acquisition

by Cisco of portions of IBM’s networking intellectual property. This

relationship is primarily centered on services more than pushing products, as

that is what provides value to the customer.

The partnership will deliver a powerful combination of networking solutions,

technologies and services to businesses and service providers worldwide.

You have mentioned that you would like to participate more

actively with partners for enterprise systems group and software group. What are

the activities that IBM has planned in this regard?

We are doing this by way of training our channel partners and

converting each one of them into product specialists by way of IBM certification

programs.

We are running several channel programs right now. some of

these include pSeries and iSeries where IBM offers incentives to those sales

specialists who get enabled and certified on pSeries (RS/6000) and iSeries

(AS/400).

The other program is called 'Brave New Blue Warrior' which

rewards the team of business partner sales specialists for winning in the

marketplace.

The program called 'Lethal Warfare' recognizes those warriors

(sales specialists) who fight competition and win with IBM. This program demands

high level of salesmanship and the rewards are equally lucrative.

'Destination 2002' program sends the top five business

partner sales specialists to exotic locations like Bali, Indonesia to break free

from their work routine.

IBM also offers incentives to those sales specialists who get

enabled and certified on storage offerings like NAS, SAN, disks or tapes.

Apart from these brand specific programs, we also have

cross-brand programs which reward business partners for winning in any of the

brands. This is over and above other incentive program that may already exist.

And which are these cross-brand programs?

There are quite of few programs in this category. One of them

is 'PartnerWorld'. Under this program, partners have a kitty or pool, which is

credited by a percentage of the business done by them in a year. This kitty is

used for marketing of events and training for sales specialists, which the

partner might want to undertake.

A DQCI INTERVIEW  in Mumbai