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

Can you put a number on the percentage of partners that you feel need to make a change?

We all need to make a change. The way we looked at that -- we did what we call 'Channel Capacity Analysis' and we looked at what kind of client calls they were making, were they mostly calling on the IT or the line of business, to what kind of sales calls they were making? What we found is they were still too much to the left, which was IT, and too much to the lower side, which was largely a relatively simple sale. That means that we had to move up tens of thousands of business partners. I never thought in terms of percentage. For almost all business partners we decided to add to their capabilities new capabilities. Basically, for every business partner we complemented what they could do with something else, so all of them evolved.