"Working with the IBM team has provided valuable guidance and support toward creating an integrated pipeline process. The work that we have done with the Sales Connection team has more than doubled our pipeline of opportunities with IBM."
— Jaimin Patel, director of business development, WebLayers, Inc.
The Company
WebLayers is a market leader in automated policy-based SOA governance, a concept that enables organizations to realize the full potential of SOA by focusing on the lifecycle of services and composite applications within the SOA infrastructure. WebLayers is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The Market Opportunity
Early on, IBM assumed a leadership role in SOA and recognized that ISVs would also play an important part in developing and selling SOA solutions. To that end, IBM made sure that the means were in place to identify and support innovative ISVs, such as WebLayers, Inc., that it could best work with to answer the challenges of its customers.
WebLayers automates what has traditionally been a manually intensive process to employ governance. They provide enforcement across the entire lifecycle and give large enterprises the visibility to identify and resolve issues earlier. With SOA governance, large enterprises can achieve the success they envisioned with their SOA initiative — service reuse, reduce the cost of integration, and ultimately making their business more agile and adaptive.
"WebLayers provides a common thread that unifies governance across all IBM product families," explained Patel. "This, combined with the depth of WebLayers policy management capabilities, differentiates it from the competition and helps IBM to accelerate sales and extend its dominant leadership position in SOA."
The IBM Strategic Advantage
For assistance in meeting that objective, WebLayers has become well-connected within the vast IBM community. From developing and marketing its solution, to finally signing on that dotted line to close a deal, WebLayers works closely with IBM teams from the Venture Capital Group, SOA Strategy, the IBM Innovation Centers, PartnerWorld Industry Networks, WebSphere® and Rational® software development and the IBM software sales force.
WebLayers was made aware of the technical resources available through the IBM Innovation Centers and, for marketing and sales assistance, pointed towards PartnerWorld Industry Networks and its go-to-market benefits for business partners.
Introduced by its VCG client manager, the WebLayers development team turned to the IBM Innovation Center in nearby Waltham, Massachusetts, for assistance in meeting the requirement of one of its customers, a leading U.S. insurance company. The engagement was a success. Without the no-charge System z education, system access, expert advice and troubleshooting support provided by the IBM Innovation Center teams in Waltham and Dallas, Patel estimates it would have taken at least a year and would have been far more costly to accomplish what the WebLayers developers did in less than six weeks.
Patel is most enthusiastic about WebLayers' experiences with IBM Sales Connections, a benefit that links business partners to those in the global IBM sales force who can leverage their existing customer relationships and product knowledge to help identify and close sales opportunities.
"We started out with 15 opportunities and within six months we were up to 50. With each opportunity, we get connected with the right IBM sales team that knows the right people in the customer account. The increased collaboration creates the opportunity for IBM and WebLayers to win against any competitor in the SOA market. We have demonstrated this in several accounts, closing deals with major insurance and financial firms."
The Venture Capital Firm
WebLayers first became associated with IBM through Veritas Venture Partners, a venture capital firm headquartered in Herzliya, Israel, with offices in Atlanta, Georgia. Well-acquainted with both the vision and quality of WebLayers' solution and with the leadership role that IBM plays in SOA, Gill Zaphrir, general partner at Veritas, could see that the two would make a perfect match. He brought the companies together in 2005.
"The IBM Venture Capital Group recognizes that it has a critical mission in helping a new business partner navigate through the IBM enterprise," said Zaphrir. "Getting the needed attention is challenging, to say the least. We are impressed with how responsive and efficient the Venture Capital Group has been in identifying resources and directing WebLayers to the right people within IBM to help with its development and sales activities."