IBM Channel Chief Kate Woolley On Growing The Partner Ecosystem

‘And as I listen to them, I need to be focused on – how do we build on what we’ve got but create this ecosystem of partners that love working with IBM?’ Kate Woolley says in an interview with CRN. ‘They’ve got to love working with us. That’s how we’re going to get to our aspiration.’

Kate Woolley, the newest person to take the role of IBM channel chief, told CRN in an interview that her goal is to speak with 100 partners in 100 days. So far, that goal has taken her across the globe, including Germany and the U.K.

“I spent the last – coming up on three months – a lot of time with our partners,” said Woolley, who quietly started her new role in January. “And as I listen to them, I need to be focused on – how do we build on what we’ve got but create this ecosystem of partners that love working with IBM? They’ve got to love working with us. That’s how we’re going to get to our aspiration.”

Woolley takes on the channel chief role – her formal title is general manager of ecosystem – after more than a year as IBM CEO Arvind Krishna’s chief of staff.

Her previous role gave her a holistic view of the Armonk, N.Y.-based tech giant and direct perspectives” on what Krishna envisions for IBM’s channel ecosystem.

During her time as chief of staff, she worked with Krishna to define his priorities, drove IBM initiatives across the business and was part of the team leading the separation of IBM’s managed infrastructure services business and other major projects.

The former Bain & Co. partner spoke with CRN about her goals as channel chief, recent changes to IBM’s partner portal and what partners can look forward to as IBM continues to invest in growing its partner ecosystem. Here’s what you need to know.

What would you like channel partners to know about you?

I lead the IBM ecosystem, stepped into this role, a new role, in January, where we are really redefining the IBM ecosystem.

Prior to this role, I was chief of staff to our CEO, Arvind Krishna (pictured), for just under two years. And that’s how I joined IBM, actually, which I’ll come back to.

So with Arvind, we spent just under two years working with him, new CEO stepping in, how does he define his agenda, his strategic priorities. Working with him on the Kyndryl spin out. How we defined his mid-single digit growth plan. And really related to the current role, witnessed firsthand how critical the IBM ecosystem is to IBM and IBM’s future.

Prior to joining IBM, I was a partner with Bain & Co. I led Bain’s cloud computing center of excellence globally and worked with a lot of different technology clients globally and focused a lot on sales excellence and customer experience.

That’s my background. Because ‘ecosystem’ can mean a lot of different things to a lot of people, in this role a few different parts of my business – so we have the channel business, selling with, through tens of thousands of business partners.

We have our ISV and technology partnerships. So how do we embed, scale with our partners? All of the labs that support that part or that motion. Red Hat marketplace. Also our developer advocacy community – so how do we engage with developers to increase the skills the adoption of our hybrid cloud AI technologies?

And underlying all of that, the partner platform and user experience and what that looks like. So that’s kind of in a nutshell what sits in my new remit. On the personal front, I live in New York City with my husband and my two children.

What benefits come with your previous work experience?

In my prior, prior role, from that, I bring outside perspectives and some new perspectives from what I saw as a consultant working across the industry and across other industries. And so can challenge some of the status quo with an outside-in perspective.

And then from my last two years, I bring the direct perspectives from the CEO on what Arvind’s vision is, where we are collectively taking IBM, what’s important and how we go and execute against that.

There’s outside-in perspectives and then there’s CEO perspectives. And bringing that together to challenge where we are going is, I believe, pretty powerful.

What are some of your major goals for 2022?

I spent the last – coming up on three months – a lot of time with our partners.

And as I listen to them, I need to be focused on – how do we build on what we’ve got but create this ecosystem of partners that love working with IBM. They’ve got to love working with us. That’s how we’re going to get to our aspiration.

I’m on track to hit my personal goal of speaking with 100 partners in 100 days when I first hit the ground running. And they’re saying to us, ‘We want to do more with you’ – in very energizing conversations, actually – ‘How can we do more together? What does that look like? How do we join forces to reach more?’

That’s the powerful force of the ecosystem. How can we do more and reach more together? And partners are feeling that the IBM ecosystem is front and center in IBM strategic priorities.

They’ve heard that. They’re excited about that. They like IBM’s strategy. They want to be a part of it. But they’re telling us that we need to do more. We need to be easier to do business with. And we need to become more essential to them. … As I think about what my priorities are, everything has to ladder up to that. We have to double our revenue, IBM ecosystem revenue, in the next three to five years. And that’s the way we do it. We’ve got to be easier to do business with and be essential to our partners.

How is IBM becoming easier to do business with and becoming more essential to partners?

We’re on a journey. Being easier to do business with … We’ve got to have this frictionless, end-to-end user and digital experience for our partners. And we’ve taken some steps along that path.

So the partner portal is just an example of one of the steps. The partner portal is going live in the U.S. the week after next with deal registration. It’s already live elsewhere.

And I think this is one of the most significant improvements we’ve made to our interface with our partners. I was with a partner in the U.K. the day the portal launched and they – unaided, unprompted – said, ‘I’ve been in there this morning. This is a big leap forward.’

I was with a partner a few weeks later in Germany. And they said to me, ‘Look, I can do a deal registration in less than two minutes. This used to sometimes take me up to 30 minutes.’

The simplicity’s great. And there’s more functionality coming in that. But they can create quotes, submit documentation, interact with us in a really easy way.

We have a support chatbot in there where they can interact with IBMers. See opportunities. Accept opportunities. Starting next week, we will have automatic deal sharing so we can get more opportunities to our partners. Opportunities of a certain definition will go straight through to partners. More to come on that as we continue to build that. But we need to continue to simplify, continue to streamline. We’ve got to give them a better onboarding experience so we can get partners productive faster. Give them guided paths as to how they do training.

You can imagine all of the power of AI in this, to eat our own cooking. We’ve got to put AI in there to have a recommendation engine around the rewards and where they should go next.

That’s the first piece of being easier to do business with. The second piece of it is – how do we give our partners the support and the skills they need? A couple of things we’ve done. We’ve made big changes to our go-to-market model recently. So we’ve doubled the amount of brand specialization and brand specialized resources we have in the ecosystem. And we’ve increased our technical expertise by 35 percent.

We hear from partners, ‘We need expertise. We need skills.’ We hear this from our clients as well. This is not this is not unique to partners. And so that’s how we’re evolving our go-to-market model. We’ve got our build labs where we can provide the technical support to build and embed with our ISV partners. So that’s how are we easier to do business with.

And then on the second piece around how do we become more essential to our partners – this is, ‘How do I enable our partners to create more and earn more with us?’

This is a work in progress, but the direction of where we’re heading there – today we pay our partner we pay our partners to transact with us. We’re one of the most profitable vendors. Our partners tell us that. But we pay them to transact with us.

As we think about evolving our program, how do we support our partners to differentiate our portfolio earlier in the sales lifecycle and work with them and support them to do that? And then how do we help them to land and deploy that platform so it’s really sticky with our collective clients? So there’s more to do there.

And then as we think about, for example, our co-marketing and our demand generation – we have to work out how to create more opportunities for and with our partners. Get more opportunities in their hands. And we hear that. Again, this is all based on what we’re hearing for our partners. It’s been a busy few months.

How do you think about changes to benefit the entire channel when today partners have a variety of business models? I’m sure you are seeing ISVs open an MSP business and MSPs becoming vendors.

So I couldn’t agree more with everything you just said. If I distill it down to the simple way that I would think about it … we have defined three motions as to how we think about engaging with the IBM ecosystem.

So sell motion, selling with partners. Build motion, how do we embed, build, how do people build on, build with, run with our technologies.

And the service motion. How do we support partners who are building services around our portfolio? To your point, we have to design a program and have a program that doesn’t say you have to fit into one of those buckets.

What we can say is, ‘This is what it looks like to engage with IBM and partner with IBM in one of those tracks.’ You don’t have to just be one of them.

So if I think about, say LTI, a system integrator in India, we’ve got build labs – so our build motion – co-creating solutions with LTI for their insurance agency clients.

So how do we actually use IBM technology with what they’re doing to leverage social media to help identify what the risks are – so combining our talent, their talent, our resources, to create solutions. There’s build in there. There’s service in there. There’s sell in there. So it’s all everything.

We have to continue to evolve those clearly defined tracks. We’ve got to understand, to your point, partners are evolving. VARs are not a fulfillment channel. They’re doing bits of everything. And we’ve got to meet them where they’re at.

So that is the complexity but – I think – the beauty. We’ve got the three tracks but we’ve got to recognize people are going to enter them in different ways and cross over them in different ways.

Distributors are becoming more important in certain partner ecosystems – is this the same for IBM?

Very important relationship with our distributors because they’re living all of this as well.

So as we think about engaging with their partners, their resellers, their resellers are doing all the same things – trying to go across the three different motions.

The distributors are thinking about how they play into the different motions as well. So really critical. We have always obviously very close relationships with our in the U.S. with our three big distributors. Very, very important relationships. And we’ve got to make sure that we’re in lockstep as well in terms of what skills they have, how we support those skills, because then they use those skills to support our partners.

Do you want to see more partners in the IBM ecosystem? Or are you thinking more about how to deepen your relationship with existing partners?

The short answer is we have to do both. We have to grow our number of partners, and we have to deepen our relationships with them. … It’s absolutely critical.

We are investing in an initiative – I hate to call it an initiative – but to that exact point. How do we find our next set of really large scale marquee partners? Especially as you think about IBM strategy around hybrid cloud and AI. Who are going to be our next set of marquee partners that maybe we don’t do business with today?

So there’s that piece of it. But then there’s also the piece of – how do we activate and grow and reactivate maybe some partners that we’ve done, that we’ve partnered with in the past. So we need to continue to grow that. So those are two very clear priorities as we think about both sides of that.

For existing partners, what’s your advice to them on getting the most out of their IBM relationship?

For existing partners, we think about where the technology landscape is going. And we think about these two forces of hybrid cloud and AI.

I used to look at this day in and day out in my consulting days. But that is the destination that all of our collective clients are heading towards.

There are lots of different ways to play into that. But I do think that for our existing clients, working out how to play into that and how IBM can support them to do that.

So to your point – and it will differ depending on where the partner is at on on their journey and their focus – because there’ll be some where, to your point, it is about how do we expand from the very solid base they have into other areas.

We have partners that claim very niche areas. But I was with a partner in France that is a very new partner for IBM actually. And they play purely in the data and analytics space.

And so for them, their interest in IBM is all around Cloud Pak for Data. What does that look like? What do I do with it? How can I use that to help my clients?

They’re getting just completely deep and immersed in all of that. And there’s a lot to that. So it depends, I will say, on the partner. But it is about thinking about where our clients are headed – our collective clients, IBM and our partners – and then how do we play into that and how does IBM support them to go after that and to do that.

What’s the pitch to potential IBM partners to join the ecosystem?

As you think about the journey that IBM is on, we are a very different company to what we looked like only a couple of years ago.

With the acquisition of Red Hat, with the spin out of Kyndryl, and with this renewed focus on hybrid cloud in AI, and the commitment – Arvind’s top down commitment that the IBM ecosystem is an absolute priority to him.

He has said, ‘We have to get growth through the channel.’ He has declared that publicly. And that is blowing through our entire organization. That is why I wanted to go into this role leading the IBM ecosystem.

And so for new partners, we want new partners to be a part of that with us. And so for some who might have thought, ‘IBM’s not so important for me or not so relevant for me,’ we’re worth another look because of where we’re heading and where we’re at now.

And this commitment to give them the support to grow their business. We can’t grow the IBM ecosystem without all our partners growing. So come and be a part of that renewed focus and that renewed growth.

We are committed to doubling the IBM ecosystem revenue in the next three to five years. That’s my mission. … The number of IBM partners delivering revenue for IBM’s hybrid cloud platform has grown by 80 percent in the last year.

What does your appointment to channel chief mean for the IBM channel hierarchy?

I have all of the ecosystem. David La Rose (pictured) is a key member of my team. And then all of the, as I said, the build, ISVs, the technology partnerships, developer advocacy, Red Hat marketplace, that all comes under me as the IBM channel chief.

I report into Rob Thomas. We’ve got it (the channel hierarchy) within the sales organization, which I actually think is also just very, very powerful because we’re not separate.

IBM has direct sales and channel and there is no difference. I have a seat at the table with that. So I actually think it is very powerful and is also just another way of sending a message through the IBM organization that this is a priority.

Anything I didn’t ask you about?

I joined IBM because I believe in the vision of the company. I believe in Arvind’s vision and his leadership. That was also the reason I wanted to move into the IBM ecosystem role.

I recognize that our partners have a choice as to as to who they partner with. They’ve got to absolutely love working with IBM. And that’s my job – to deliver that. Make it easy for them and be essential to them. That’s my two priorities.