Christopher Jackson
IBM Software Senior Business Development Manager | TD SYNNEX
TD SYNNEX and IBM Quarterly Business Review
In a business that moves at pace, we’re naturally focused on the road ahead. There’s always another partner conversation, opportunity, Teams call or priority competing for attention – the next opportunity, the next challenge, the next destination.
But every so often, it’s worth looking in the rear-view mirror. Not because we want to spend too much time looking backwards, but because understanding where we’ve been can give us a clearer view of where we need to go next.
Our recent QBR with IBM reminded me of something surprisingly simple: sometimes you don’t realise what you have done and achieved until you stop and review it.
A good QBR shouldn’t simply be a retrospective analysis of the past three months. It should help us understand the journey we’ve been on, challenge assumptions, identify opportunities and, most importantly, answer the question: what are we going to do differently tomorrow?
When you’re moving at pace, you rarely step back far enough to appreciate the distance you’ve already travelled. When we did, the scale and breadth of activity were striking.
Reflections on H1
In the first half of the year, our partner demand generation programme continued to deliver strong results, generating qualified customer appointments and creating sales-qualified opportunities with significant deal-registered pipeline behind them.
Around one in five qualified appointments progressed to a sales-qualified opportunity, demonstrating that the programme is creating genuine customer conversations rather than simply generating activity.
At the same time, our TechStories.ai platform and associated targeted demand generation activity continued to deliver across a broad range of partners and campaigns.
Around seven in ten marketing-qualified leads progressed to deal registration, creating significant pipeline for our partners and demonstrating the quality of the targeting, content, and opportunities being generated.
Those numbers are important, but they also tell a bigger story about the direction in which technology distribution is travelling.
Distribution is changing
For many years, distribution was primarily viewed as a route to market, connecting vendors, partners and customers and helping technology move efficiently through the channel.
While that remains important, the landscape has changed, and distribution has evolved with it. Increasingly, we’re helping partners identify new markets, build technical capability and practices, generate demand, access marketing investment, navigate complex SaaS and consumption models, and turn emerging technologies into commercial opportunities.
Perhaps nowhere is that evolution more visible than in Agentic AI.
Over recent months, we’ve been busy creating a low-risk environment where our partners can explore IBM Bob and the wider Agentic AI opportunity.
Through sandbox environments, demonstrations, deep local technical expertise, certifications, business development and marketing support, partners can experiment with the technology, explore customer use cases and determine where they want to invest.
This isn’t simply about demonstrating another technology. It’s about helping partners answer bigger questions, including:
- Where does AI fit within our business?
- What services could we build?
- Which customer problems could we solve?
- How do we turn experimentation into a repeatable, scalable commercial proposition?
Our partners are now actively using this framework to shape their AI strategies, develop real customer use cases and begin building AI-powered services.
From distributing technology to enabling growth
What struck me most during our QBR wasn’t any individual metric; it was the sheer breadth of activity taking place across our business and our partner ecosystem.
Modern distribution brings together technology, technical expertise, enablement, marketing, financing, business development and an extensive partner community. Done well, that helps partners navigate change with less risk, build capability faster and take new solutions to market more effectively.
In practical terms, that support spans five connected areas:
Strategy and Market Opportunity
- Identify market opportunities using data and analytics
- Build long-term growth strategies
- Develop go-to-market plans and propositions
Skills, Practices and Enablement
- Build technical, sales and commercial capability
- Develop IBM practices and specialist skills
- Participate in enablement workshops and technical training
- Connect with IBM specialists and resources
Technology and Solution Adoption
- Accelerate AI, automation and hybrid cloud adoption
- Navigate SaaS, subscription and licensing complexity
Marketing and Demand Generation
- Access marketing investment and campaign execution
- Generate demand and create pipeline
Sales and Opportunity Management
- Progress and govern opportunities through the sales cycle
- Access flexible commercial and credit solutions
We’re not just helping partners sell technology; we’re helping partners build businesses around technology.
Seeing all these initiatives together in one place was a useful reminder that the real value of distribution is not found in any single activity. It comes from combining multiple capabilities to help partners grow faster, reduce risk, and unlock new opportunities.
Perhaps more importantly, it highlighted that we need to do a better job of communicating these capabilities. If some of our own team members are surprised by the breadth of activity taking place, there is every chance some partners are unaware of the support available to them.
That reflection alone made the QBR worthwhile.
Building capability for long-term growth
One of the key themes from our review was the importance of investing not just in opportunities, but in capability.
Sustainable growth comes from enabling our partners to create even more customer value and deliver successful outcomes. That opportunity extends beyond IBM’s current partner ecosystem to include organisations that do not yet partner with IBM today.
Our established IBM partners bring deep expertise, strong customer relationships and valuable industry knowledge. Our opportunity is to build on those strengths – deepening practices, expanding specialisms and continuing to strengthen technical confidence.
At the same time, there is a significant opportunity to welcome partners from outside the IBM ecosystem, giving them a clear, credible and low-risk path to engage with IBM, starting with customer needs and business challenges rather than simply leading with a portfolio.
Over the last six months, we have focused significant effort on partner enablement, practice development, technical readiness, and commercial support. That approach has helped accelerate partner proficiency growth, expand skills both inside and outside the IBM ecosystem, and create a larger pool of partners capable of supporting IBM’s strategic software portfolio.
And as technologies such as Agentic AI continue to develop, that role will become even more important. The road ahead will continue to change. AI will reshape business models, consumption models will evolve, and customer expectations will rise. In that environment, simply moving faster isn’t necessarily the answer.
The organisations that thrive will be those that know where they’re heading, but also recognise when to check their progress, learn from the journey they’ve been on, and adjust their direction.
That’s why our QBR mattered – not because we wanted to spend time looking in the rear-view mirror, but because occasionally looking back gives you a clearer perspective on the road ahead.
It helped us recognise how far we’ve already travelled, the value we’re creating alongside our partners and, most importantly, where we can go next.
About the Author
Chris Jackson is the IBM Software Senior Business Development Manager at TD SYNNEX UK, where he leads the IBM Software Business Development team, working with IBM and its partner ecosystem to accelerate software growth across the UK market. With over 20 years’ experience in the technology industry, Chris specialises in partner strategy, business development and go-to-market execution, helping partners build scalable, outcome-led software practices that deliver long-term customer value. Passionate about partner enablement and ecosystem growth, Chris and his team work closely with resellers to develop the skills, capabilities and commercial strategies needed to succeed in an evolving software and AI landscape.
