Susan Follis (Kyndryl)
Kyndryl, the business entity formerly known as IBM’s Managed Infrastructure Services unit, was officially spun off from the mothership in early November after more than a year of planning.
Now, the company is looking to use its newfound freedom to expand its horizons, both in terms of the vendors it partners with and which clients it works with.
Already, Kyndryl has made the first of what will likely be many key strategic cloud partnerships, thanks to a new pact with Microsoft.
Under the agreement, the companies will develop new products built on Microsoft Cloud and aimed at facilitating digital transformation. Microsoft has also become Kyndryl’s only Premier Global Alliance Partner.
Indeed, partnerships and alliances that were once taboo – lest they saw IBM collaborate with traditional competitors – and new customers in whole segments of the market that were largely out of bounds previously are now fair game for the publicly traded company.
And this newfound freedom is set to see the company adapt its approach from region to region.
“We are not in IBM’s ecosystem, which we were before, and our ability to partner is greater,” said Susan Follis, Kyndryl's managing director in ASEAN and go-to-market growth unit executive for Asia Pacific, the Middle East and Africa countries. “You’ll see a big difference in our partnerships.
“In this region, for example, there’s AliCloud [Alibaba Cloud], so we’ll have certifications here, and with Google’s presence in Indonesia, we’ll have certifications there.
“We can target our investments locally to expand within ASEAN to address individual clients’ requirements,” she added.
While Kyndyl is working to build out its partner ecosystem on the vendor side, it’s also expanding the areas of the market it wants to focus on. IBM has long courted the very largest enterprises and government organisations, making that end of the market its core focus.
Now that Kyndryl is out of IBM’s shadow, it has the freedom to pursue customers in other parts of the market – and in a region like Southeast Asia, there are plenty of opportunities across the market spectrum.
“We’re investing our ability to grow in this much-expanding market,” Follis told Channel Asia. “We’ve got new clients to reach out to. We need to scale and address clients we wouldn’t have before. We used to only have very large clients. But now, for ASEAN, we can scale down and really address that market.”
As a result, according to Follis, it is expected that Kyndryl will gain a greater share in many different markets across the region, as well as in markets that weren’t addressable before because it couldn’t partner with other providers as freely as it can now due to the aforementioned competition issues.
With this in mind, Follis hopes to see Kyndryl join forces with partners that have multiple offerings, with the company looking to gain certifications for all the big cloud providers’ offerings.
This approach, Follis reckons, will mean the company can scale to meet the requirements of customers in the region, many of which might have a favourite cloud provider, or perhaps several preferred cloud providers, they want to continue working with.
"If they [the cloud providers] are coming to ASEAN, we can partner with them,” she said.
Read more on the next page...
