Asif Valley, channel sales manager, IBM SA software group, says the new Software Value Incentive (SVI) programme represents one of the most simplified incentive approaches in the industry, aiming to enable partners to increase their profits.  

The SVI programme was designed based on input from hundreds of business partners. SVI offers greater earning potential, because it focuses on rewarding partners for the value they bring across all three stages of the sales cycle - opportunity identification, closing the sale, and fulfilment of the software to customers, Valley says.
 
As a result, business partners can receive a substantially increased percentage of the revenue of the IBM software sold, positioning them to make more money than they could in previous or competitive incentive programmes.

Previous IBM business partner incentive programmes focused the majority of the incentive on fulfilment activity. SVI takes a value approach and significantly increases the incentives for the partners that are involved earlier in the sales process - during the identify and sell stages - independent of whether they are involved with fulfilment activity. This allows these partners to retain more margin than in previous programmes. Additionally, SVI offers incremental incentives for partners who sell solutions into the high growth SME customer segment.

Besides providing additional incentives, SVI will allow business partners to retain more margin by implementing a new opportunity registration system, Valley adds. It allows them to receive a preferred incentive fee for registered deals when the sale closes. This allows partners to invest in additional people, skills development, and building solutions that better solve their customer needs using IBM middleware, Valley says.