The growing complexity of the technology environment makes it impossible for a single vendor to offer all the solutions that businesses demand. Therefore, some tech companies have realized that the way is to come together to go further.

One of those companies is IBM, which has accelerated its relationship with its partner ecosystem to respond to a broader range of customer needs, according to Jason Kelley (pictured, right), managing partner and general manager of global strategic partnerships at IBM. The company recently announced that is investing $1 billion to help partners and their customers capture the estimated $1 trillion hybrid cloud market opportunity.

“This thought of being able to look at a client’s, let’s call it a workflow, let’s call it a value chain, from one end to the other … it’s going to take many players to cover that,” he said “And then we, as IBM, want to make sure that we are the general contractor of that capability with the ability to convene the right strategic partners, bring out the best value for that outcome, not just technology for technology’s sake, but the outcome that the end client is looking for.”

Kelley and Mani Dasgupta (pictured, left), chief marketing officer of global business services at IBM, spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the recent IBM Think event. They discussed IBM’s go-to-market strategy, the benefits this brings to the company and its partners, and cases where the participation of the entire ecosystem is essential to solving the problems of business and society. (* Disclosure below.)

Working together against the pandemic

Some notable examples of successful execution of IBM’s go-to-market strategy centered on the partner ecosystem occurred during the pandemic. When Pfizer Inc. developed one of the first COVID-19 vaccines, IBM worked with SAP SE to help the pharmaceutical company get the vaccines out to distribution.

More recently, IBM partnered with Salesforce.com Inc. to help businesses, schools and governments as they strive to reopen safely in the wake of the pandemic. They integrated IBM Digital Health Pass and Salesforce Work.com Workplace Command Center to provide individuals with a verifiable and privacy-preserving way to manage and share their vaccination and health status.

“I call it our blockchain technology and obviously supply chain, but there’s also AI, IoT,” Kelley said. “This is truly an orchestration effort that has to happen with very well-designed capability, and so, of course, we master in design and tying that entire ecosystem together and convening it so that we get to the right outcome.”

This go-to-market strategy is a win-win model in a coopetition market, according to Dasgupta. In addition to providing more value to the customer, this allows for the delivery of a wider range of products and services. While IBM has its products running within its partner companies, it also has its products running within IBM.

“This is a very interesting and a new way of doing business. I would say it’s almost like the modern way of doing business with modern IT,” Dasgupta concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM Think. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for IBM Think. Neither IBM, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE