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

Did you have a bunch of partners that stopped working with you?

Some of them will stop being IBM [partners]. We track our business partner by what they are authorized to resell. If the only thing they were authorized to resell was System X, then they have nothing in the portfolio any longer. However, some of them we approached them with new offerings -- for example, SoftLayer -- because when you sell x86 capabilities you can sell it on-premise or off-premise. We are bringing a number of them into the SoftLayer ecosystem. We had a number of partners that were only System X. It's nowhere close to the 140,000 [total partners].