By Paul Kunert
21 August 2008
IBM will publish its Principles of Engagement document in the UK next month to offer guidance to partners and direct sales teams about which customer accounts it expects them to operate in.
In the US, Big Blue has already distributed copies internally and among business partners, including a list of 100 named accounts that IBM will deal with direct.
The guidelines pertain to System X sales but will be rolled out across Power Servers, storage, System Z mainframes and to other geographies, said Mike Bernard, IBM general business and marketing for the UK and Ireland.
“In the US, System X is a highly competitive market and we think that this gives us a competitive edge by making business partners more confident about dealing with IBM,” he said.
“We are working to see what will be done in Europe but I expect us to [roll it out here],” he added, “I imagine the date will be mid- September as that seems like a sensible time scale.”
The product division that is most frequently criticised for channel conflict is software but bizarrely only the hardware units mentioned will get view of the guidelines.
Bernard expected the engagement model will iron out instances of conflict and provide more consistency. But he insisted any problems were not systemic and he did not believe the software division should be singled out.
One of the tenets of the Principle of Engagement is the Rule Of Incumbent which dictates a VAR that has worked with a customer and has 50% of System X revenues should remain unchanged.
On top of this will be the Decision Tree that provides IBM with a set of guidelines where it should sell direct, work with the partner or jointly engage.
Providing absolute guidelines to IBM direct sales team and partners was something Tom Kelly, UK managing director at Logicalis was “100% supportive of”.
“It will provide clarity to the partner community as to what the ground rules are and should prevent squabbles further down the line,” he said, adding like many vendors IBM was not immune to channel conflict.
