IBM wants to recruit “hundreds, if not thousands” of partners to take its newly launched watsonx GenAI platform to market in 2024, its General Manager of Partner Ecosystem in EMEA, David Stokes, has revealed.
Big Blue will use an ecosystem approach to grow watsonx, whose book of business is already in the hundreds of millions of dollars following its unveiling in May 2023, he told IT Channel Oxygen.
watsonx is being styled in some quarters as an “AI comeback” story for IBM, with CEO Arvind Krishna recently admitting the vendor was “slow to monetise” AI.
Talking to IT Channel Oxygen, Stokes (pictured, top) claimed watsonx cuts through the GenAI hype by enabling partners to “apply GenAI to a business context”.
“We’re looking to recruit hundreds, if not thousands, of partners onto the platform over the course of this year,” he said.
“It comes back to our strategy of putting the ecosystem at the centre. watsonx, just like Red Hat OpenShift, is a platform, and that platform will only grow, absolutely directly, with the number of partners who either sell, build on, or build services around that platform.”
“What we’re bringing to partners is AI for business”
Talking on its Q4 earnings call last week (see transcript, here), IBM CEO Arvind Krishna revealed that watsonx’s book of business “roughly doubled” during the quarter, having hit “the low hundreds of millions” in Q3.
High-profile use cases include Sevilla Football Club using it to find the right players to sign.
“There’s a lot of hype [around GenAI],” Stokes said.
“In the end, though, the serious work of implementing AI in the business world takes a lot of work around governance, tooling and openness, so that we can really unlock the tremendous productivity and growth benefits that we think AI can bring.
“What we’re bringing to our partners, and then in turn to our clients, is AI for business.”
“They never would have worked with us before”
Since it launched watsonx education on Partner Plus, “hundreds” of partners have gained the badge, Stokes said.
IBM used last week’s Techxchange event in Barcelona to unveil new watsonx partnerships with NTT Data and Migrato.
The former is setting up a Centre of Excellence around watsonx.
“You’ve got the platform itself, but then on top of that you’ve got a set of assistants that could be used either in a customer environment, for personal productivity tooling, or for code assistance – which is one of the more interesting use cases we see driving AI usage. NTT Data are setting up that centre of excellence to help clients with numerous use cases, but focused on using those assistants,” Stokes explained.
Migrato is a much smaller, data-focused partner based in the Netherlands, Stokes added.
“In the case of Migrato, that’s a partner who would never have worked with us before and didn’t know a lot about IBM. The way they came to [watsonx] was simply working with our client engineering teams and building a proof of concept within 48 hours,” he said.
“What we’ve realised over the last couple of years is that it’s not really about taking products off the shelf. It’s about how do you co-create solutions together.”
“We’ve put ecosystem at the centre of our strategy”
The watsonx push comes three years after IBM made a decision to “put ecosystem at the centre of our strategy”, Stokes said.
Since then, the vendor has moved all customers sitting in its ‘Select’ segment (which make up 50% to 60% of its total business in most geos) to a channel model, with only the largest customers purchasing direct. Then last January, it launched Partner Plus.
“Partner Plus has been successful in terms of attracting new partners to IBM which may not have seen us as an option in the past,” Stokes said.
“And it’s probably re-awoken some partners who were maybe working with us opportunistically.”
A new services track added to Partner Plus last month “was really a response to the fact that service providers need a different level of support,” Stokes said.
“They are trying to create replicable solutions that might be more typical of an ISV, but not in those volumes. It’s about giving them access to co-creation abilities,” he explained.
This year, IBM will invest in more “digital sellers” to cover smaller accounts with partners, Stokes said.
“What we’re trying to do is drive a real cultural change around our sellers, so they see the multiplier effect of working with partners to reach more clients with more value,” he said.
IBM’s approach to watsonx (which will be used to “enhance the fan experience” at the GRAMMY Awards next week – see above) – is consistent with its decision three years ago to embrace an ecosystem, Stokes said.
“How do you grow technology as a platform? You grow it through building an ecosystem,” he concluded.
Doug Woodburn is editor of IT Channel Oxygen
