Q&A: IBM's Dupaquier On x86, SoftLayer And Moving Partners Up The Stack

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I know some partners have expressed concern about getting into SoftLayer, getting attention there. Are you relying on distribution to help release those bottlenecks?

Oh yes. We spent a lot of time on that subject. We believe that we need the distributors to help us there. SoftLayer is an outstanding cloud technology, but we needed someone to be able to scale and we did not have the resources to be able to scale to the hundreds of thousands of business partners that we needed. We are using distributors most everywhere. We need them. They bring the value that we need. We don't use them for traditional, what we call 'Distributor 1.0,' having huge warehouses. It's mostly managing the ecosystem, managing skills, managing certifications. We pay for value.