Dave Vellante with co-host Steve Kenniston (Global Storage Evangelist with IBM), interviewed Wilfredo Sotolongo, IBM VP of WW System X Sales, during theCUBE’s live broadcast at the recently concluded IBM Edge 2013 event.

Sotolongo was one of the first decision makers on expanding Edge beyond Storage, to bring into the market place the way IBM’s customers are buying. While sometimes that is solution- or product-specific, most of the time it’s more of a cross-brand or a cross-technology approach. Seeing this event the way it unfolded today gave Sotolongo a great deal of personal satisfaction.

4 patterns of customer buying habits

Diving into the metrics of the business, Wilfredo Sotolongo thinks he’s identified four distinctive patterns regarding customers’ buying habits. On one hand, there are the extremist customers:

• At one end of the spectrum, there’s the buyer of business outcomes who is looking to automate a process or a service.

• At the other end, there’s the buyer who knows *exactly* what he wants from the technical point of view and who wants to come up with the best-of-breed solution. They are the self-integrators. As such, they want to specify not only what type of server they want, but also how many bits and bytes should this or that process have.

In between those extremes there are two categories that Sotolongo takes avid interest in, due to his business:

• Clients who want the flexibility of the self-integrator, to whom IBM is providing reference architecture. There are a plethora of reference architectures built on IBM and on IBM software stacks, allowing clients to easily and efficiently deploy solutions (for cloud, analytics, or even high performance computing).

• The buyer of integrated offerings. This type of buyer is willing to give up a little bit of flexibility in exchange for a fully configured, fully tested stack solution that provides some data base engine capabilities and some process queuing capabilities.

So the four patterns are: the self-integrator (aka the piece-parts buyer), the reference architecture buyer, the integrated-solution buyer and the business-process buyer.

There has been a shift in the percentage of these types of buyers. Four years ago it was 60-40 for the first two types opposed to the last two. These days the percentage is a bit more balanced. The first two types (extremists) constitute a third, the third type (more flexibility) makes up a third, and the last type (fully-configured) makes up the last third.

Company culture – shifted for the future

The people at IBM must also shift their minds as they develop new products and create solutions.

Vellante wanted to know exactly how much flexibility is in the reference architecture and what was IBM’s strategy regarding flexibility. Sotolongo explained that IBM is approaching reference architecture from the customer’s point of view. They start by doing market research regarding top solutions in the marketplace. Then they look for the most popular, enabling them as well in the reference architecture. They enable their own products and the products of their competitors.

Just to prove that you never know it all in the business, Sotolongo admitted they were totally blind-sided by the desire of their clients to self-integrate. Who knew they were going to prize their “independence” so much? But they did.

Kenniston agreed, putting himself in the shoes of the business owner who sacrifices financial savings and picks software that can help him better manage his business and his growth. When building his architecture, it’s not always about the hardware.

Vellante asked about IBM’s position on the Channel, and the message to key Channel partners. Sotolongo clarified that the Channel is not a global business, but a local one. Some distributors may develop global businesses, but they still operate locally. The marketplace is substantially different in North America than from the rest of the world, because of regulatory norms, taxes or local laws. There’s a high dependency on The Channel outside the U.S., despite its lack of maturity. However, it is a critical and stable component, explains Sotolongo. In the U.S., the Channel is quite mature and developed, and engaged in quite a war for talent.