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

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Out of those meetings, what would you say is the most surprising thing that you heard from the partners?

Nothing surprised me, but much of the feedback confirmed my strong beliefs. One of them is that everything we do in IBM is very much aligned by product line in the organization, instead of being by solutions. We had to break the internal silos. We knew it, but this became a burning platform for us. Something we had to go do very, very quickly. The second one that surprised me a little bit, because the question came back again and again and again, is the question of how they should pay their reps for a stream-building cloud kind of service. Their reps are very much incented on transactional business. If you pay your rep on the margin on a cloud deal, that is not much. This is some of the very, very good questions that we had. Some we have resolved and some we are working on.