Axiz partners are boosting their competitiveness by tapping into IBM skills and technology to add value to their customer offering.
This is according to Jen Gouws, Business Development Manager at Axiz, who says customer expectations have changed over the past year: “We have seen significant growth in the number of organisations asking for customised solutions that match their specific requirements. Customers today also want faster time to digital value, and they need partners who can provide the deep industry skills and expertise to help them fast-track innovation. They also need partners to guide them in developing their digital roadmaps.”
However, building the necessary resource pools and creating and bundling technologies with an offering can be time-consuming and expensive, she says.
“This is where IBM ESAs (embedded solution agreements) offer a solution. IBM ESAs allow partners to leverage IBM’s innovative technology with open standards, and combine it with their own intellectual property – their value add – so they can deliver a complete solution to customers under their brand and on their terms. ESAs give innovators and solution builders the opportunity to combine their intellectual property with IBM technology to create a total solution for their clients based on their individual business needs. ESA is ideal for technology partners looking to sell their own solutions built with IBM technology, because it reduces development costs and increases profits with flexible pricing,” Gouws says.
Benefits of ESA
With the IBM ESA program, Axiz partners can simply embed IBM technologies and development tools into their pre-existing solutions.
With an IBM ESA, it’s easy to tap into the power of IBM’s technologies to reduce and control the development costs of the products and offerings you build for your customers. The IBM ESA program empowers you to accelerate product life cycles and drive your branded solutions to market. Your customers have a vast portfolio of IBM embedded products to choose from – backed by Axiz and IBM’s expertise.
With a huge portfolio of IBM products to choose from, IBM ESA solutions include IBM software products such as: MaaS360, Big Fix, QRadar, Cognos and more. Choose from a wide range of IBM’s complementary products and take the creation and development step out of the equation. An IBM ESA offers flexible pricing, so keeping costs down. It also offers technical guidance and support, including access to code samples and other resources. ESA allows partners to create a solution that suits each customer’s particular business needs.
Gouws says: “IBM ESAs make it easy for a partner to enhance and customise their offering to be more competitive in the market. They speed up time to market and reduce development costs, and can also enable partners to accelerate their sales cycle by delivering software as a service bundled with their offering. IBM supports resellers by helping them take the whole solution to market and there is the added advantage of IBM pricing, which allows them to establish a predictable cost model to operate from. By embedding IBM technology in your solution, you can meet new client demands, reach new markets or industries and grow revenue.”
Partners leveraging IBM ESAs have achieved noteworthy successes across all industry verticals, Gouws says. “For example, in the banking sector, IBM SPSS Modular technology was deployed to improve service quality by vetting and approving up to 50% of credit requests without human intervention. In the insurance sector, Cloud Kubernetes Service on IBM Cloud helped achieve a 15-point rise in the customer’s net promoter scores and a 60% increase in customer response rates. In the retail sector, IBM Watson was used to dramatically improve time to respond to customers, answering 90% of incoming requests without human intervention and freeing up staff time, allowing them to focus on more important tasks,” she says.
Axiz underpins channel value creation
As a value-added distributor for more than 25 years, Axiz believes that its own transformation depends on building ecosystems that enable its channel to transcend technology to enable real digital value creation.
Axiz partners benefit from extensive support with personalised assistance from its dedicated IBM ESA program team. This team comprises technical architects, business development managers and product managers who work together with channel partners to ensure their success, with support including:
- Program management: Axiz helps channel partners navigate IBM's Embedded Program with a high level of knowledge, experience and responsiveness.
- Enablement opportunities: Axiz provides a full range of training, education and enablement sessions as needed to equip our partners to effectively sell IBM technologies.
- Financial support: Axiz manages the contract process and provides credit, financing and vetting.
- Expertise: Axiz resources can help design, build and expand embedded solutions business with technical, marketing and ESA operations/process support.
- Relationships: Axiz relationships with IBM and channel partners can assist partners in building solutions, services and go-to-market partnerships.
The dedicated IBM team at Axiz is ready to assist and help you onboard or answer any questions. Contact us at: IBM@axiz.com
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