Growth markets are a key strategic area for IBM, and the company is highly focused on expanding into new locations, with more than 100 branches planned this year.

This is according to Mark Hennessy, GM of global business partners, speaking at the IBM PartnerSummit, being held in New Orleans this week.

He stressed the role of business partners in expanding into new markets, as they often have the relationships and solutions needed to drive growth in these areas. Growth markets make up 22% of IBM`s revenue, with an expectation to have that at 30% by 2015, said Hennessy.

Included in this segment are Asia-Pacific, central and eastern Europe, Latin America and Middle East and Africa. According to David La Rose, VP of business partners for growth markets, priorities for IBM in this area include expanding into new territories (geo-expansion), building partner communities in the cloud space, and taking share from the competition.

La Rose added that the company plans to expand to another 20 African countries, with fully-fledged offices already running in places like Nigeria and Kenya.

IBM is also investing heavily in its growth markets portfolio. Of the $2 billion the company has invested in its business partners, 50% has gone to growth markets, a third of which has been spent on marketing initiatives. This includes the company`s co-marketing efforts, whereby it provides marketing support to partners who lack these capabilities.

The next biggest area of spend is on skills and certification, right down to getting final-year students to become familiar with IBM`s brand and solutions. The company also offers incentives for sending employees to acquire skills, certification and training, said La Rose.

Asif Valley, IBM business partner organisation executive for IBM SA, notes that training approaches were similar across the globe. These included upskilling partners in cloud computing and managed services capabilities – vital features as the market faces a transition from the traditional reseller to more managed solutions offering `whatever as a service`.

“It doesn`t differ from country to country,” said La Rose. “As tech evolves, we will continue to evolve skills and partners from around the world.”

Valley added that training had to be seen as an ongoing effort, due to both the high attrition rate and the changing nature of markets and technologies. IBM has over 5 000 areas of specialisation, and growing, and Hennessy urged partners to take available rebates and invest the money saved into the skills and specialisation areas they wanted to drive.

Hennessy said the three top considerations for business partners today were how to develop better value for customers, how to sell integrated solutions, and how to make use of IBM`s investments in the channel, through training and incentive programmes.

(Lezette Engelbrecht is hosted in New Orleans by IBM SA.)