After reflecting for a bit on my experience at IBM’s PartnerWorld, I was hit by a realization that in many ways, IBM’s ISV heavy approach is driven by the same, fundamental realization that drives its commitment to open source: community is the only sustainable model for addressing broad based technical challenges. Building a case that margin conscious ISVs and the free and open source communities are tied inextricably together in IBM’s worldview may seem a bit daft, but bear with me.
Monday at PartnerWorld opened with a bang. In the Madison Square Garden-like arena they had some violin heavy opening act that I’d never heard of previously, but fit the Vegas ethos perfectly. When Donn Atkins took the stage afterwards, and Doug Elix followed, the uniting theme behind the presentations - besides the IBM-style jargon-heavy lexicon - was the degree that they fawned on the attending ISVs. Seriously; the attention bordered on genuflection at times, and believe me, guys like Atkins and Elix kowtow to no one lightly.
All of it - the pomp, circumstance, spectacle, and, yes, the professed love and admiration for the attendees - is part of a carefully designed effort to win over ISVs hearts and minds, not just their platform loyalty. IBM’s not just pitching technology here; they’re pitching team, shared success, etc. They had Mia Hamm speak on Wednesday for a reason, after all.
“Teaming” (which makes me think of bacteria, weirdly enough) and “joint solutions” were the watchwords of the conference, and were heard at least as often as “infrastructure.” This focus on interaction and relationship building was not new: IBM, along with countless other enterprises, has been pushing these concepts for years in attempting to create artificial keiretsus. What was interesting, however, was how IBM is trying to extend the partnership relationships on an ISV to ISV basis: think personals for enterprises.
Whether the ISVs buy into these emotive plays depends largely on the ISV, unsurprisingly. But what’s interesting is that it pays dividends either way, because ISVs know that IBM is committed. If one of the major goals for the PartnerWorld planners was to have ISVs walk away knowing that IBM cares about them, it’s clear that they can check that one off as mission accomplished. While none of the various partners and ISVs I spoke with thought IBM was perfect, pretty much to a T they believed that IBM “got it,” and perhaps more importantly, cared.
But the question from some might be: why? Why must a vendor the size of IBM be so careful to make sure thousands of smaller partners are well looked after? In my opinion it’s about one, simple realization that IBM came to 5 years ago when it quit the application business: no matter how big they get, no matter how many services guys they have running around, they simply can’t do everything, or be everywhere. And even if they could, enterprises don’t buy that way.
So if IBM can’t be that way, they might as well try and sell to the people who can. Like open source, PartnerWorld is first and foremost about community. As Dave Eggers might put it, it’s about having a lattice to share the load. IBM makes no bones about the fact that it intends to lean heavily on its partners for continued success, and few other large enterprises have made as significant a bet on their partner community as IBM has. From the reactions are PartnerWorld, the partners both recognize and appreciate this attention.
But to really take its partner community to the next level, IBM would do well to take a page from its other community play: open source. That community is less rigid, less formal, and more open. Making its partner programs more open would make them more partner-friendly, and as one partner put it, less IBMlike. That might not be a bad thing.
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