By
Craig Zarley
28 September 2007 06:42AM
Tags:
ibm | pursues | targeted | partner | recruitment
Once a dominant force in the channel, IBM's partner recruitment strategy now appears heavily tied to drafting new solution providers tied to selling niche solutions.
That was evident this week when IBM announced its AnyPlace Kiosk family of self-service consumer kiosks built around AMD's mobile Sempron and Turion dual core processors.
As part of the product launch, IBM is seeking to attract new business partners to sell the kiosks and expand beyond traditional retail applications.
"This gives an up sell opportunity [to IBM's existing POS business partners] and we are also looking to recruit some new partners," said Juhi Jotwani, director of marketing and strategy, IBM Retail Store Solutions.
"The interest we have in recruiting is in partners who can focus on industries outside of retail." This emerging partner recruitment strategy comes as IBM is seeking to regain its US channel footing after selling off its PC business to Lenovo almost three years ago.
A significant number of SMB solution providers interfaced with IBM through its PC business and many say that IBM has lost touch and lost favour with them in recent years.
A recent CMP Channel research survey, for example, found that the number of solution providers who are authorized and sell IBM products dropped by 9 percent from June 2006 to April 2007.
Jotwani cited healthcare, public sector, travel and transportation, and restaurants and food service as attractive verticals suitable for the new kiosk systems. She also said IBM's POS distribution partners, Ingram Micro, Arrow ECS, and ScanSource will spearhead the new partner recruitment efforts.
Lance Sedlak, Arrow's general manager, Retail Solutions Group, agreed with the assessment that IBM is now taking a very targeted, solutions-oriented approach to partner recruitment.
"That's right on target," he said. "IBM is taking a very solutions-oriented approach and a channel-oriented approach.
This really presents an opportunity for all channel partners, both IBM and non IBM partners, to look at the ways in which they engage their customers and consider how these products represent new opportunities to present solutions to those clients."
Sedlak said he was building a new recruitment strategy that would include using the kiosk platform as a solution set that could attract solution providers that currently aren't IBM business partners but are looking to expand into new markets. He declined to reveal the number of new IBM partners he expects to sign up as a result of the new kiosk solutions.
Tom McLelland, president of DynaTouch, a San Antonio solution provider specialising in kiosk solutions for the public sector market, said he's in the process of becoming an IBM business partner as a result of the new kiosk products.
"We are in the process of becoming an ISV on IBM's hardware and we are also in the process of establishing a reseller agreement," he said. "We've been in the kiosk, self-service business for 20 years.
One of the needs that we haven't been able to meet is for a small footprint, compact solution that has the functionality we need. The new, AnyPlace Kiosk is just a better solution than we've been able to come up with."
McCelland noted that DynaTouch used to build its own custom-built kiosks systems but said today the company's primary value add is software rather than systems building.
See original article on CRN.com