The new Software Value Incentive (SVI) program is one of the simplest and best of breed incentive approaches in the industry, enabling partners to increase their profits.

The SVI program was designed based on input from hundreds of business partners across the globe. It offers greater earning potential, focusing on rewarding partners for the value they bring across all three stages of the sales cycle - opportunity identification, closing the sale, and fulfillment.

Previous IBM SWG business partner incentive programs focused the majority of the incentive on fulfillment activity.

SVI takes a value approach and significantly increases the incentives for the partners that are engaged early in the sales process -— at the identify and sell stages — independent of whether they are fulfilling as well.

This allows these partners to retain more margin than in previous programs, irrespective of whether they fulfill the deal. In addition, SVI offers incremental incentives for partners who sell solutions into the high growth small or medium-sized business (SMB) customer segment.

With SVI, IBM is leapfrogging the competition by offering the most comprehensive incentive program to the widest range of partners, including ISVs, system integrators and resellers who are leading with IBM’s middleware portfolio of offerings.

SVI will allow business partners to retain more margin by leveraging the implementation of a new, completely secure, opportunity registration system featuring a dedicated portal, where partners can register their sales opportunities.

When the sale closes, partners receive an incentive fee for registered deals which ensures that they will be rewarded for their contribution to the deal closing.

This allows partners to protect their profitability and invest in additional people, skills development and solutions incorporating IBM Middleware, that better solve their customer’s needs.

SVI was launched in April in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. In Asia Pacific, the program was rolled out in to great success in Australia and New Zealand in April, and will now be implemented in ASEAN and Hong Kong, as part of the continued AP rollout.

Nick Redshaw, Director, SMB, Channels and Telesales, IBM Software Group, Asia Pacific commented, "Partners are a critical part of our business here in Asia Pacific and we want to recognize and reward their efforts to collaborate with us. As part of our own growth strategy, IBM wants to work with our partners to boost the margin they see from their sales of IBM middleware."

George Inocencio, Managing Director of Info Alchemy, IBM’s business partner, said, "IBM’s program is definitely partnercentric. It shows that IBM recognizes the efforts being spent by BPs across the selling cycle, and not just in the fulfillment phase."

SVI reduces the fear of many BPs that their selling efforts will go to naught if the customers decide that they like the BP’s proposed solution, but need to go through a public or open tender due to internal audit or policy purposes, said Inocencio.

"It definitely paves the way for increased collaboration amongst the partner community, knowing that efforts will be fairly compensated. A solution- and services-oriented organization like ours will benefit from this program by being able to maintain our independent stance as data integration and analytic "advisors" to our clients, and not worry about having to go toe-to-toe with license pricing."

To take advantage of SVI, business partners need to be a member of IBM PartnerWorld at any level. Qualified partners can register their sales opportunities by accessing SVI through the Global Partner Portal housed within PartnerWorld.