Welcome!

IBM’s dynamic partner ecosystem is made up of thousands of problem-solving companies like yours from all over the world. This document will help you become a part of it, so that all of the knowledge, skills and solutions that an ecosystem through IBM can provide are available to you.

This guide will help you understand the value of working with IBM and lead you through the step-by-step process of creating a solution with IBM.

Each page of this onboarding guide has a Next button at the bottom, to allow you to progress through the complete onboarding process. Additionally, the pages are listed in the left-hand navigation panel. You will need to complete all of the steps for one level of partnership before moving to the next level.

Let’s get started.

Who is the audience for this Guide?

The IBM partner program comprises IBM’s overall range of services and offerings for our Partners. It has so much to offer your business, and the full ecosystem of partners within the program offers even more.

IBM’s partner program is organized around three activities: Build, Sell, and Service. You might perform one, two or all three of these activities, based on your goals as an IBM partner. This guide is focused on Build activities.

Areas of Opportunity

By partnering together, we can help companies become...

• Data Driven – Many companies still face fragmented data sets which provide limited visibility into how their processes and applications are actually performing. We believe companies should be able to easily connect and collect all structured and unstructured data sourced throughout their enterprise, organize, catalog, analyze and mine the data to understand their as-is state, and where they can benefit from automation.

• AI Powered – Many companies have diverse and mismatched skill sets, and typically rely on a few experts for understanding the data, how to leverage the insights, and how to prioritize the work. We believe in the power of machine learning and AI, applied to the full set of enterprise data, to visualize the bottlenecks, gaps, opportunities and to create custom KPIs to measure progress and outcomes.

• Actionable – Many companies struggle to execute business and IT automation projects because it requires a lot of custom development by teams of engineers and data scientists. We believe in using the AI derived insights to quickly and easily automate business and IT processes from directly within the software, giving practitioners the power to automated with low code / no code tooling.

• Agile – The few companies that achieve a level of automation, have difficulty staying there, and often face large re-implementation projects as conditions change. We believe in a closed loop feedback system where data generated by automated processes is fed back into the AI model to continuously improve automation efficiency and ensure companies remain agile and resilient.

We believe IBM is uniquely positioned to capitalize on these growing markets, with:

• The only enterprise-wide automation platform that provides a single view across business, IT and development operations.

• The ability to optimize business issues by providing insight into how organizational processes fully work, and visualizing hotspots and bottlenecks.

• Increased productivity and improved operational efficiency by rapidly automating complex and repetitive processes.

• Superior customer experiences, provided quickly and easily through continuous process optimization and AI-infused domain specific software.

Rungs on a ladder

The easiest way to understand the onboarding process is as a progression through rungs on a ladder:

Notes:

• Each IBM Hybrid Cloud offering has customized requirements, pertaining to that offering. A partner must meet the offering-specific requirements to achieve the level of partnership with that offering. Therefore, a partner can be at different levels of partnership with different IBM Hybrid Cloud offerings.

• The decision to create an IBM part number (SKU) for reselling or OEM'ing a partner product, is made by the IBM product team and is typically used to fill gaps in the IBM portfolio. An IBM part number is not a standard benefit of the ecosystem program. To understand embed, co-sell, and resell options: https://ibm.box.com/shared/static/bni94shp2qx9tm20053bn21m6s94rkr6.pptx​

• If you want to embed an IBM Hybrid Cloud offering in your software product, there's a special agreement for that, with a deeply discounted price. Email us at [email protected] for more information.

• To schedule a meeting with us, email [email protected]

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