For IBM, it's all about driving volume and velocity with the partner ecosystem

“We're spending a lot of time with value-added distributors and not just resellers because everybody has a key role to play. We're fully committed to the two-tier distribution model. We think it makes sense for our business,” says Kareem Yusuf Ph.D., IBM Senior Vice President for Ecosystem, Strategic Partners and Initiatives.

For IBM, ensuring its partners are well prepared to be subject matter experts in all products offered is imperative to their goal of becoming even more successful in 2026. The technology vendor, which has a strong partner ecosystem in Asia Pacific, recently shared growth plans and opportunities for partners at the IBM APAC Growth Summit in Da Nang, Vietnam.

In an interview with CRN Asia during the summit, Kareem Yusuf Ph.D., IBM Senior Vice President for Ecosystem, Strategic Partners and Initiatives shared his vision and hopes for the partner ecosystem in the region as well as areas he feels partners will need help the most in order to be successful.

According to Yusuf, 2026 will be all about volume and velocity as the vendor looks to scale its business reach not just through partners but also the need to scale the clients that they don’t serve directly.

“When you think about scaling our business, you really have to begin to reach more broadly to more partners. The nature of the region (APAC) has led us to quite an extensive partner network, and it's really refining and growing the volume and velocity of deals. So, that's really what our priority is going to be, scaling reach with the right kind of focus products, and driving the kind of volume and velocity of business we need,” explained Yusuf.

Specifically, Yusuf believes it's all about making sure that IBM has a focus set when it comes to working with partners to scale the business in the region. This includes optimizing consumability, which is an experience of the product that leads partners towards more SaaS delivery that becomes an important element of it.

For Yusuf, the focus will need to speak to pricing, cross-sell and up-sell, and what are the hooks that partners can create between products to enable that. He added that IBM products have some very clear, distinct value propositions as well that can be easily enabled through project-based or use-case-based adoption, which he thinks will be important for the channel.

This is where he believes partners would need to focus on project-based selling. When it comes to closing these deals, not all of them would involve board-level decisions. These smaller project-based deals, once closed, can use a meter for expansion for future opportunities.

“If you look at the service partners, especially the GSIs, they will typically find themselves in much higher-level conversations. Whereas some resellers, just depend upon what level at which they engage and the relationships they have,” said Yusuf.

“People buy technology to get something done. And so, I think we have to be ready to respond in both directions. When you look at the region, you look at people trying to get started or focused on something. The use-case-based entry point is an important one for us to rise to the occasion. And we can only do that with our partners,” added Yusuf.

What follows is the rest of the conversation CRN Asia has with Yusuf as he discusses the partner ecosystem in APAC.

Are you seeing that similarity across all the different regions or is APAC a bit different compared to the other regions?

I think in the macro sense, it's very similar, especially when you move out of the particularly large clients that we have served for a very long time. Anywhere I look at scaling reach, your product is kind of what's introducing you, and you find yourself very much in that use-case-based way.

So, I think it's, I wouldn't call it region-specific, I would definitely call it amplified in APAC because we have so many different sub-markets and different levels of technology adoption or different technologies that have been leveraged at different times.

We're all coming through this inflection of modernization at this point where generative AI is causing everybody to re-evaluate every element of their IT infrastructure or technology capability set. And so, I think it makes it kind of particularly important at this time.

In your conversations with partners at the Growth Summit, what are they most excited about, looking forward to working with IBM next year?

Look, to me, it's all about alignment, right? At the end of the day, if you think about partners, channels, and ecosystems, it's all about how we can align around a common goal.

I think our partners are excited by the refreshes and the additions that they've seen coming into the product line. Because if you have compelling technology, then you have a reason to sell. They've been very excited on the hardware side by what we've been doing with Fusion and the very notion of what I would almost call an AI workload targeted piece of kit.

They love the additions we've made into the portfolio with things like HashiCorp, Terraform and Vault, and the role they play in infrastructure automation and all of that. That's that nice tangible stuff that folks can really sink their teeth into.

I think we've seen some great maturation over the last year with our What's Next Orchestrate product. Agentic AI and the notion of multi-agent orchestration, especially in the context of capturing business processes. They're seeing how we're leading. And it's playing, again, into our strengths of being hybrid and heterogeneous by design.

It's all of the above. It's not a, you can't just use one technology or one AI provider, especially in the context of business, then surrounded by all the things we do well around governance and security.

So, I think our partners are excited by the portfolio. I think they are very excited by our push and focus to expand reach and the role that they can play in that. And I think, really, for them, it really is going to just come down to execution.

And that execution part is where I assume they're also facing challenges? Would you say that's the area they're most challenged at this point in time?

I would say, yeah.

So two areas that I think are really important for us to do better. The whole notion of the partner experience, read that as tooling, integration and automation. In terms of the business of working with us, we've made some important strides, but that is a major area of focus for us, even as we're going next year, embed more AI assistance, just make it easier to do business with us. And I think that becomes really important when you want to drive more volume and velocity.

So, I definitely think that there's more we can do to make it easier for partners to do business with us. And so, that's a major important element of it.

The other aspect beyond making it easier to do business with us is then also that whole process of pipeline generation and progression and effectively passing the opportunities through.

At the summit, there was a lot of focus on skilling. How important is that for your partner ecosystem here?

I don't think you can be successful in the technology business today without being very well skilled. You have to understand the technology. And so, to me, I think expertise with our partners is going to be critical. We are investing a lot to enable that.

I think as you focus on things like use case-based selling, it really allows that to be done. But, you know, expertise should just not be what I would call, underestimated. I don't think you can be successful selling technology without the key knowledge of it in today's world.

Where do you see partners challenged the most in terms of skilling as well?

I think it's the transition. Let's be honest. I mean, for years, and particularly if you think about this from a software perspective, I would argue that, for years, we had settled into some pretty stable technology stacks.

You had databases, you had app servers, you had integration software, right? The last two years have been pretty transformational, with generative AI really shaking up the stack. And also bringing to the fore a lot of other things that people were really focused on, like FinOps. Nobody was talking about FinOps for a long time. Now it's at the center of everything in a hybrid world.

So, I think it's been more the fact that the technology stack, generative AI has shaken up the whole technology environment that is creating the need to catch up on and reinforce skills, especially given how fast moving those technology areas have been.

Are you looking to grow the partner ecosystem, based on the capabilities and the reach and the more use case approach? Would you see that a need to grow your partner ecosystem to deliver that?

I always struggle a little bit with that word growth because I think sometimes it's misconstrued to drive a numbers game. And I don't, I'm less focused on number of, and I'm more focused on the productivity of the ecosystem.

To that regards, I think it's less about growing the ecosystem and more ensuring that the ecosystem is most as productive and as activated as it can be. Now that will mean some partners will come in; some partners will swap out. But I think it's really a lot more about how we can drive more productive business and growth than just growing as a numbers game. Because certain regions or certain customer sizes or project-based work may suit certain partners while others will be more suited to other stuff.

So, it's a bit of horses for courses. And I think the real job we have is building a channel that has that right mix of profiles.

So, does this in any way impact, you know, the IBM Partner Plus program?

I think it definitely impacts our program in terms of understanding the ideal partner profile and making sure that we're matching.

There's no tales out of school. I'm very, very focused on what I would call channel health and partner performance management. You need to understand what your channel is doing.

There are two things that I find very interesting. Obviously, my background is not deep in channels at all. I come from the product world. But I did find it quite fascinating how often people can have a discussion around channel and never discuss once what is actually being distributed, which is the product, right? You've got to build a channel for a product.

The channel exists to distribute the product. So, you can't divorce these two things. And I do think that in that regard, you then have to understand how well your channel is doing with the particular products or the particular segments.

And so, then that brings you very much the notion of partner performance management with the idea to make sure that you know you're building those feedback loops so you can pull the right levers, and you have the most productive channel you can. And so that is something I will be intensifying focus on.

That means you would be looking at enhancing the partner program?

I would say enhancing. Enhancing and evolving. The constant enhancement and evolution, knowing what the right signals are to look for that then drive the right actions to basically continue to manage the, let's use the other word, ecosystem.

And that's the other thing about words that have meaning. If you think about what an ecosystem is meant to be, if you think of it from the ecology perspective, that means you've got various participants that have to, you're trying to optimally align them towards a common goal. And that means that there's things are going on in that environment that are required to optimally align them.

It's the same thing. We talk about having an ecosystem and then we don't talk about what it means to actually manage that ecosystem for success. Well, in my view, you actually need to actively manage it. And so, your program will evolve to support such things.

This is where IBM is having more value-added distributors and value-added resellers coming in because they are evolving as you guys are requiring them to do as well. And you're noticing that growing more now?

We're spending a lot of time with value-added distributors and not just resellers because everybody has a key role to play.

We're fully committed to the two-tier distribution model. We think it makes sense for our business. And so, the roles and responsibilities, what's the responsibility of the VAD with regards to partner recruitment and activation as an example? And how does the VAD really support and drive this notion of extended reach? How do we leverage things that the VADs themselves are doing with things like VAD marketplaces and the like to make it easier and easier for their partners to transact with our technology?

I would actually argue that automation and integration is probably most important for us to optimize that with the VAD because then that drives the full-on benefit for the VAR who's coming through that VAD.

I think it's really important to understand each of the core elements and actors within the ecosystem, the VAD, the VAR, the service partner, the build partner, and continue to actively manage that and explicitly manage towards the outcome, which, as I've said, is scaling growth.

So, would you say that scaling growth will be your priority and focus for next year?

Always. Next year, year after, this year, the year before. Scaling a business is the reason for being a business, but remember one thing that is very important.

To sustainably scale a business, you need to sustainably deliver value. There's no, you can't separate the two. You can't just go grow a business without delivering something of value.

So, to me, it always starts with, do we have a value proposition? In our case, a technology-based value proposition that we can deliver and continue to maintain, and how do I scale that, the delivery of that value proposition, leveraging the ecosystem?

Looking at the performance that your partners have done this year and last year, and the growth that you've experienced, do you foresee it to continue in that same level?

I want to actually accelerate it. I want to do more through partners. I think to achieve our goals, I'm looking to easily triple to quintuple volume through partners.

Arvind (IBM CEO) spoke at the CRN conference a couple of weeks ago. His statement was that he would love to see 50% of IBM business go through partners.

That is a considerable jump, especially when you think about our focus on the growth of our business outside of what I would call traditional top customers. And so that means really tuning a channel, an ecosystem, that really expands and extends our reach. So, I expect to do a lot more, and that's why I talk about volume and velocity. That will be a key indicator of growth for us.

How are you guys looking at investing in your partners and making sure that they are able to deliver that volume and velocity?

Well, look, I think there's two key things that are required. One, the product itself.

Two, this brings me back to where I talked about automation and integration. So back to what do we invest in the partner portals? Just take something like quoting as an example. Quoting, you don't just have to invest in effective quoting and pricing. You have to invest in the integration of that into systems so that it's all very seamless in terms of how the partner is engaging. It cannot be no swoop.

So, we're spending a lot of time looking at the VADs, looking at their systems and saying, how are we ensuring everything is actually automated and integrated? How are we reducing their cost to serve? Because if we don't reduce that, the volume becomes gated because it's too expensive to handle, because I don't know, there's too many emails and too many PDF attachments, right?

So that is where we begin to invest. When I think about enabling volume and velocity, so one side you need to build the right product. On the other side, just picking automation and integration becomes important. And obviously the business processes that surround that, quoting, pricing, all that kind of good fun stuff.

What are you hoping to see most from them in return?

I think it goes without saying that I want to see a partner ecosystem that is well-versed in our technologies, particularly the newer products, especially as we look at our focus products, particularly for what we call the select territory focus products for the expansion.

I'm definitely expecting to see an ecosystem or a channel of partners who are a lot more versed and active in taking out that value proposition. So that's kind of number one.

Number two, linked to that, ultimately, I expect our partners to expand our reach. So, I do think it's very important, and this is something we're very focused on, that we need to create enough market pool. We need to create demand for our technologies. And so that's a big element of what we're focused on.

But I also hope to see partners ultimately building new businesses without us. Independent, or Business Partner Opportunity Identification. I would love to begin to see more and more of that building over the years, in terms of volume of independent business they can drive because they become so enabled, we build good products, and they are expanding our reach. That, I think, is something I'm really hoping to see as we go through. That will be another element of vibrancy.

Lastly, what's your message to partners?

The key message right now is partners should understand our strategy, pick aligned focus areas and product areas, and let's just focus on scaling business. I'm very clear about what I want. I've been pretty clear with the ecosystem when I first formally addressed everyone in May this year.

My message is pretty consistent. So, as I said, we'll make those investments in what we need to do around automation integration. We'll make sure we're aligned in our incentive stack with our strategy.

And kind of my message to them is, together there's a real opportunity for us to go drive growth. We think that they are an integral, essential part of our growth. I'm committed to making that happen. Goodness for both sides.