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

With all the changes going on in the portfolio, how is the partner base changing? What are you doing to support that and the new types of partners that you are seeing?

It's basically what I'm spending most of my time at. I would say I would have done it even without these x86 divestitures that we made. This announcement of us selling the business to Lenovo made my life actually easier because what we were talking about became very clear, which is we want our business partners to be very much aligned to value. The strategy is very simple. It's bringing your business partner to a higher-value portfolio. If your business partner remained very much on the lower level of the stack, then eventually you become disconnected from your business partner, and at some point you don't need them. We move business partners up [the stack]; we bring new business partners on board because some of them are a very different kind of business partner. Clearly, MSPs are a very strong focus for us in many dimensions; cloud services, software developers are very strong goals for us as well. System integrators are also good for us and our biggest growth opportunity this year.