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IBM India plans to roll out a number of packaged enterprise services which can be easily sold through partners. Apart from setting up a dedicated team for managing the sales of services through channels, the vendor is also planning to launch a series of campaigns to popularize these packages.
“We are constantly looking to create more opportunities for partners to grow their business by offering differentiated products to their customers. We have set up a separate division to drive services through channels and have appointed a business manager to head it. The business manager will be
supported by the product management team and will have a dedicated channel sales team,” said Anoop Nambiar, Country Manager, Business Partner Organization, IBM India.
IBM has already started creating awareness about the services among the partner community. Currently, its account managers are working with 45 partners to enable them to sell services. “We are sitting with each of these partners to analyze their existing capabilities and working out a plan to train and enable them to sell various services,” added Nambiar.
IBM plans to add more productized offerings with standard pricing, SLAs, and even defined channel margins. “At IBM Global Services we have a large array of services provided to very large enterprises. Some of these services can be productized for mid-market customers and sold through channels,” informed Nambiar.
One of the services that the Big Blue is successfully offering through partners is in the area of Internet security and intrusion prevention. “Already, 90 percent of this managed services in the country is done through channels. We are currently running an aggressive print campaign around this service and have also launched an incentive program for partners,” said Nambiar.
IBM is also offering Datacenter services like storage disaster recovery management. “We are offering a data security package which can be easily sold by channels, and which starts as low as Rs 100 per GB per year. It provides customers assured availability of critical data during any disaster,” Nambiar added.
IBM has also started offering remote infrastructure management services through key partners. Soon it will launch data migration and replication services.
Nambiar said that IBM is already working on the next phase of the partner enablement program and has identified 96 more partners who will be trained to provide packaged services. |