Strategic Partnerships Reimagined

#sponsored

The landscape of enterprise technology partnerships is evolving rapidly, and IBM stands at the forefront of this transformation. Nick Otto, who leads IBM's strategic partnerships after 20 years with the company, shares a compelling vision of collaboration that transcends traditional vendor relationships.

TLDR:

• IBM's partnerships with AWS, Microsoft, Adobe, Salesforce, Palo Alto, SAP, and Samsung focus on combining strengths to address market needs

What does it mean to orchestrate billion-dollar partnerships in today's AI-driven world? Nick takes us behind the scenes of IBM's relationships with tech giants including AWS, Microsoft, Adobe, Salesforce, Oracle, SAP, and Samsung. These aren't mere business arrangements—they represent a fundamental shift in how enterprise technology providers create value together rather than competing head-to-head.

The conversation reveals IBM's unwavering commitment to openness and client choice. Beginning with the hybrid cloud narrative that followed their Red Hat acquisition, IBM has consistently championed the philosophy of letting clients run workloads wherever they choose. This same principle now extends into the realm of AI, where IBM has made its Granite LLM capabilities available across multiple cloud platforms.

Perhaps most fascinating is IBM's approach to the emerging field of agentic AI. Instead of creating isolated capabilities, they're fostering bi-directional collaboration between their agents and those of partners like Salesforce and Oracle. This integration-focused strategy recognizes the reality that most enterprises are building complex technology ecosystems rather than single-vendor environments.

The strategic importance of cloud marketplaces emerges as another key theme, with IBM significantly expanding its presence on AWS and Azure platforms. With 70 software offerings across 89 countries on AWS alone, and plans to enable resellers across 22 new countries soon, IBM is meeting clients where they increasingly prefer to purchase technology.

Looking forward to the next phase of partnership innovation? Nick outlines three focal areas: deeper technology integration, continued support for hybrid approaches, and more creative commercial constructs. The goal remains consistent—helping clients solve problems their way, with the technologies they choose, delivered how they want them.

🎙️ Tune in as I speak with Nick at IBM Think 2025: https://obvs.ly/kieran-gilmurray2

#Think2025 #IBMPartner IBM IBM Partner Plus

Chapters

• 0:00 Meet Nick Otto of IBM
• 1:06 Hybrid AI with Strategic Partners
• 1:57 Agentic AI Collaborations
• 3:35 Open Systems and Marketplace Strategy
• 6:29 Future of IBM Partnerships

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Alrighty delighted to be at IBM Think today. Nice to meet you, nick. For those in the audience who don't know who you are, would you mind just introducing yourself? Tell us a little bit about your role inside of IBM and tell us a little bit about Think today as well.

Speaker 2: 0:11

Yeah, no, absolutely, thank you. Thank you for spending the time. Nick Otto been at IBM for about 20 years, spent the majority of my career on our consulting team but I now lead what we call our strategic partners, which is a short list of about seven partners today always kind of evolving Our really large relationships. These are all billion-dollar-plus relationships that are cut across all of IBM. So IBM technology, ibm consulting, research really looking at how do we take all the great things of our partners, all the great things of IBM, and drive more value for the market?

Speaker 1: 0:40

And who are some of the names that people might recognize in that list?

Speaker 2: 0:43

Yeah, so today we've got the two big cloud partners are AWS and Microsoft, some ISVs in there, adobe, salesforce, palo Alto, sap, and then Samsung is the list today. That's not a bad list.

Speaker 1: 0:55

It's a good list. It's a good list. So how are you coming together, you and the strategic partners, with AI and hybrid cloud to deliver more value for your clients, yourselves and them?

Speaker 2: 1:06

I think at the end of the day I mean, we started back years ago now with our hybrid cloud narrative when we made our Red Hat acquisition, really helping clients with choice, helping them be able to run the workloads where they want to run them that was really the foundation for a lot of the things that we're doing today with our partners. We've built layer upon layer upon that. When you look at AI, what we do today with AI, it's really around hybrid AI. How do we make sure our capabilities work well with our partner capabilities? How do we make sure that our clients can run those capabilities wherever they want to run them on Red Hat OpenShift? So really, we're seeing more and more of these collaborations be very, very intentional Us working together to fill product gaps, to help our clients.

Speaker 1: 1:46

At the end of the day, accomplish the things that they want to accomplish. Brilliant. We're starting to hear a lot at this event about agentic AI, and you're working with Oracle and Salesforce. What are the things you're doing there to add value with agentic AI? What's happening?

Speaker 2: 1:57

Yeah, I think the agent space, as we've all heard over the last couple of days I'm sure you hear a lot more than I do it's crowded. There's lots of things happening. Lots of ISVs are creating agents, lots of consultancies are creating agents, companies are creating their own agents. Really, what we're looking to do is embrace those investments that our clients are making. I think what we're doing with Salesforce is kind of a good bi-directional version of that, where they now have the Slack marketplace around agents of that. Where they now have the Slack marketplace around agents. We're bringing our HR agent into that world, which already runs on Slack today. It's actually what we use internally at IBM.

Speaker 2: 2:30

Then you look at it the other direction, building Watson, orchestrate agents that work really well with agent force for doing sales prospecting work. So I think that kind of like bi-directional agent to agent type collaboration is a huge focus for us. You mentioned Oracle. We've got some exciting new stuff happening with them as well, starting around the HCM space. So helping to build lots and orchestrate agents that can work with the capabilities within the Fusion portfolio, starting with HR. But I think at the end of the day, what we're finding is most of our clients are looking for help on how do I take all of these different capabilities, what are the gaps that I have and how do I make sure that I can actually not to overuse the word orchestrate, but how do I orchestrate all of that together to drive the business outcomes that I'm looking for?

Speaker 1: 3:13

It sounds very open and this is something that IBM have pioneered for the last numbers of years. You know open systems, open platforms, and you haven't got it wrong yet. Now you're starting to do open agentic AI, open generative AI. Tell me a little bit more about that. What's the strategy? And is this just a continued belief in open systems and open innovation leads to more and better and quicker and faster and more valuable?

Speaker 2: 3:35

Yeah, no, you're spot on, and I do think that that open, hybrid, multi-narrative just kind of seems to work its way again, starting with cloud, letting our clients run the workloads wherever they want to run them, extending into LLMs, like lots of multi-LLM dialogues today. We've actually made our LLMs, our granite capabilities, available within OCI, we've made them available within AWS, we've made them available within Salesforce. So helping our clients really get the capabilities that they're wanting to wherever they want them and even with whatever commercial models that they want. You know, a lot of work we're doing with AWS and Microsoft is focused around marketplaces. So I think that the hybrid, open, multi-term really just continues to work through each of the different phases and for us, it's really just helping our clients solve the problems that they're looking to solve in the way that they want to solve them and not trying to force some kind of whether it's an infrastructure construct, an AI construct, a commercial construct upon them. Let them get the things that they want where they want to run them, however they want to procure them.

Speaker 1: 4:30

I kind of like that, because remember numbers of years ago IBM offered IBM. That was it.

Speaker 2: 4:34

That is correct.

Speaker 1: 4:35

Now the partnership model. Really it's focused on the client entirely, absolutely adore seeing what's happening and I can see the success from the outside in Cloud marketplaces. You mentioned those. How important are they to IBM and your?

Speaker 2: 4:49

partners. They're becoming more and more important. I think it's a space that, for IBM, we've really leaned into a little over two years ago now, specifically with AWS and Microsoft, in a meaningful way, I think. When you look across, most of our clients historically have not purchased through marketplaces. As they're purchasing more of their capabilities through the AWS and Microsoft marketplaces with Azure, we wanted to make sure that we could align with where those needs were. So the progress that we've made in the last two years with AWS, we now have 70 software offerings available across 89 countries, which is exciting.

Speaker 2: 5:24

I think the next exciting part with our AWS relationship is we've also made it easier for our resellers to participate in that motion. So coming in June July timeframe, we're opening up 22 new countries where our resellers can participate in the two-tier distribution model. So being able to resell our software on the AWS marketplace is a huge unlock and we've already seen quite a bit of success there With Azure, 30 software offerings available across 15 countries. So a lot of investment, a lot of focus and what we're trying to get from that, I think, is again helping our clients get the things that they want the way that they want them. We're also seeing a lot of uplift around new customers new to IBM customers, new to IBM software customers that are using those marketplaces to build whatever their internal infrastructure is from a software perspective and pull our pieces in where it makes the most sense. So we're really excited about where we are and where we're heading.

Speaker 1: 6:17

I think it's going in the right direction. I use the word profit partnership, which all makes sense, a kind of symbiotic relationship. So where do you see the next couple of years unfolding? What's the exciting things that we can expect?

Speaker 2: 6:27

Yeah, I think the first part. Three things come to mind. The first one is more and more technology integration. I think when you look at what we've done with AWS and making sure that Watson XGovernance works with SageMaker, making sure we have a DB2 on RDS offering, making sure that our agents work with our partners' agents, like you just talked about, with Salesforce and Oracle, I think what we're finding is more and more of our customers. I mean, they are being overwhelmed with technology and we want to make sure, specifically for our strategic partners, that our technology doesn't just work with theirs but it works really well with their technology. So we're embracing the investments that they're making across the board. So I expect a lot more of that kind of tech-to-tech software-to-software integration work, as well as optimization work, to continue to happen. The second is the continued support of hybrid multi-open, exactly as you already called out. I would expect to see even more of that moving forward.

Speaker 2: 7:25

Making sure, again, across everything, our clients can run things where they want Again, the Red Hat narrative.

Speaker 2: 7:31

Making sure that our clients can take their agents, our agents make sure they're driving value out of that. Make sure that our governance capabilities and our trust capabilities are helping clients from an AI perspective, ensure that the enterprise needs are being met, as they're doing exciting stuff with a wide array of different agent and LLM capabilities. And then finally, back to the topic we were just on more and more creative commercial constructs. I think our clients and the way the market continues to evolve is we want to make sure that clients can get what they want from IBM the way that they want to get it. So, as we get more requests from our clients to bring more software to these marketplaces, as we get, you know, kind of maybe opportunities to find more alignment points with other parts of our ecosystem. So our sell partners, as I mentioned earlier, our build partners we have a lot of progress in that space or our service partners. Really letting these strategic partners in some way be a glue that pulls together all of those different motions is a huge focus for us moving forward.

Speaker 1: 8:28

I wish you every success. It sounds like everything's lining up, which is brilliant to see.

Speaker 2: 8:33

It's an exciting time. We're very much looking forward to the future. Fantastic, thank you so much.