Career so far I have worked for IBM for more than 20 years in a variety of roles. My experiences are in driving sales and technical teams to achieve challenging growth objectives and in the management and development of long-term client relationships to increase revenue, profitability and customer satisfaction. I joined IBM as a secretary, and then moved to a technical role as a systems programmer, leading to subsequent roles in marketing, sales, sales management, European operations and business leadership.
If you could be anyone else for a week, who would you be and what would you do? I would be Stuart Pearce and make the TeamGB 2012 football team selections. My fantasy football league team would get to really play!
Cloud – friend or foe? Everyone, be they MSPs, distributors, ISVs or resellers can find a role that suits them in the cloud. It’s about looking at the core strengths of your business and working out where you want to go next. The goal for IBM is to give channel partners an opportunity to realise cloud revenue faster and get to market quicker. Our chief executive Sam Palmisano has set out the target for us that by 2015 cloud will represent $7bn in revenue for the IBM corporation. Business Partners are essential for helping us reach that target. We believe that we have a unique position to leverage when it comes to developing an ecosystem of cloud partners. With the announcements we made on 12th October, for the first time, IBM is enabling its Business Partners to take its broad portfolio of cloud solutions and IaaS cloud offerings to market. IBM is also offering training to its Business Partners through its cloud speciality programme to provide them with the tools needed to customise IBM cloud solutions to meet specific client needs and requirements.
Has 2011 been as bad as everyone said it would be? It has been an interesting year with lots of change in the channel. There have been mergers and many players are looking at how they can restructure their businesses to take advantage of the opportunities in cloud and business analytics are offering.
What would you have as your last meal? A perfect roast dinner with all the trimmings.
