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IBM leads with SOA and brings IBM Business Partner WebLayers new sales opportunities and closed deals
Responding to a rapidly changing market, fierce competition, and a flattening world economy, more and more companies are embracing the concept of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to ensure their business agility. An architectural approach that supports integrating business processes as linked, repeatable tasks or services, SOA allows companies to design, and redesign, processes and business models with greater simplicity and speed.
IBM assumed an early leadership role in SOA and recognized that independent software vendors (ISVs) would play an important part in developing and selling SOA solutions. To that end, IBM put the means 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, an Advanced IBM Business Partner headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 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.
"Our participation in IBM PartnerWorld® helps facilitate a closer sales and technical relationship with IBM," said Jaimin Patel, director of business development at WebLayers. "Our intent in working with IBM was to build a solution that integrates across the full IBM SOA product line to strengthen and help increase the IBM share of the SOA market."
For assistance in meeting that objective, WebLayers has become well connected to 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' flagship product is WebLayers Center, a policy management solution that enables organizations to define, enforce, and audit policies across the full service lifecycle. It has met IBM validation criteria to complement and automate the policy management requirements in IBM products from design through deployment.
"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."
WebLayers Center leverages IBM DB2® and WebSphere Application Server. It supports the full line of IBM System servers—including System z™—making WebLayers Center one of the only products of its kind that currently supports mainframe governance.
Other supported IBM products include WebSphere Service Registry and Repository and WebSphere Studio, along with an extensive list of Rational products, such as Rational Asset Manager, Rational Application Developer, Rational Build Forge, Rational ClearCase, Rational Software Architect, Rational Method Composer, Rational RequisitePro, and the Rational Team Concert family of products for the Jazz™ platform.
Through its membership in IBM PartnerWorld, WebLayers has earned recognition for its solution's compatibility with IBM products and for its expertise in its specific solution area and industry segments.
Because of its focus on SOA and how its solution complements the IBM SOA Foundation, WebLayers was welcomed early on into the PartnerWorld SOA Business Partner Community. After successfully meeting the rigorous technical and business requirements, WebLayers also qualified for the IBM Business Partner SOA Specialty.
Also, WebLayers Center has earned IBM Ready for Rational and IBM ServerProven® validations, showing that it has met the compatibility and integration specifications established by IBM. The validations give WebLayers the right to display specially designed IBM marks on its Web site and in its marketing materials.
WebLayers participates in the PartnerWorld Industry Networks, where it is aligned with the financial markets and healthcare and life sciences industries and has qualified for industry-optimized status in the insurance industry network. Its industry-optimized status means that WebLayers has developed further specialization by optimizing its solution with IBM technologies and has achieved success with one or more customer installations.
These validations and specialties give WebLayers greater visibility to IBM field teams and customers, as well as access to additional resources and skills.
WebLayers first became associated with IBM through Veritas Venture Partners, a venture capital firm headquartered in Herzliya, Israel, with offices in Atlanta, Georgia. Veritas is one of WebLayers' financial investors and also works with the IBM Venture Capital Group, an organization dedicated to working with the venture capital community to foster a strong ecosystem around innovation and, in particular, growth markets and emerging technologies.
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 match perfectly. 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."
Patel echoed Zaphrir's praise and added his own. "We get incredible support from our Venture Capital Group client manager," said Patel. "She made personal introductions and scheduled appointments for us with WebSphere development managers and with the Rational ISV enablement team—and that was so important. That validation from the Venture Capital Group gave us credibility with the technical people, so they were willing to take the time to speak with us. We would have had a hard time getting those meetings on our own."
Its initial introduction and resulting collaboration with the Rational ISV enablement team made it possible for WebLayers to become deeply involved with the Jazz project (the new IBM Rational technology platform for collaborative software delivery) and led to WebLayers' support for IBM Rational Team Concert, the first product family to be delivered on the Jazz platform. With that support, WebLayers Center enables Team Concert users to automatically govern services created with IBM Jazz.
Its Venture Capital Group client manager also made WebLayers aware of the technical resources available through the IBM Innovation Centers and, for marketing and sales assistance, pointed them towards PartnerWorld Industry Networks and its go-to-market benefits for Business Partners.
Introduced by its Venture Capital Group 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 customer wanted an automated governance solution for its mainframe center of excellence. Providing that capability would make WebLayers one of the first software developers to do so.
"We leveraged the IBM Innovation Center to help gain valuable hands-on knowledge of the IBM System z platform," explained Patel. "And, once the requirements were understood, the support staff at the IBM Innovation Center in Dallas, Texas, built a dedicated mainframe environment for us. Our developers came up to speed quickly and worked remotely from their offices in Cambridge."
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 managed in less than six weeks.
"Providing SOA governance on the mainframe has been integral to our success in closing deals with this and other customers," Patel said. "We owe much of that success to the outstanding support provided by the IBM Innovation Centers."
Even the best product cannot market or sell itself, and that's where the PartnerWorld Industry Networks step up to the task for WebLayers with a rich set of benefits designed to help IBM Business Partners win in the marketplace.
"We were most interested in finding ways to increase our visibility and to collaborate with IBM field sales people and other Business Partners for joint sales opportunities. And, of course, we wanted to get leads and more leads," said Patel.
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.
"The support of the Sales Connections team has been amazing. It has been one of the top reasons, if not the top reason, why we have been able to take our message to the IBM field sales organization," Patel said.
"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.
"Working with the IBM team has provided valuable guidance and support toward creating an integrated pipeline process," he continued. "The work that we have done with the Sales Connections team has more than doubled our pipeline of opportunities with IBM."
Patel said that getting closer to IBM field sales teams enables WebLayers to shorten the sales cycle with customers, and that, in turn, increases profitability for both WebLayers and IBM.
The number and variety of resources available through PartnerWorld Industry Networks can be overwhelming, but that's not a problem for WebLayers with the guidance it receives from its IBM marketing resource manager.
The marketing resource manager is a dedicated marketing specialist who provides one-on-one support to help WebLayers identify, understand, and use the industry networks benefits that can best help meet its goals. Its marketing resource manager spent time with WebLayers up front to get a good understanding of its priorities and help determine an appropriate marketing strategy.
"Our marketing resource manager often acts as a 'filtering agent,' recommending what we should or shouldn't do and which resources are most appropriate for us," Patel said. "She makes regular contact to keep us up to date about new offerings and incentives. We'd have a hard time keeping up with and wading through all of it without her."
Benefits used so far to increase awareness and generate leads include WebLayers' listing in the IBM Business Partner Application Showcase, an article in solutions-daily.com, and direct mail and telemarketing campaigns. For sales support and collaboration, WebLayers uses IBM Sales Connections and joined ValueNet® Connections to, as Patel described, "get introduced to the greater IBM Business Partner ecosystem and open up new avenues of revenue."
WebLayers has actively used the Advanced level benefits, and now, with its recent qualification for industry-optimized benefits in the industry network for insurance, there's a whole new set of resources for it to tackle with its marketing resource manager at its side.
"There's no doubt that the challenge of working with IBM can be complex and daunting, but the assistance we get from our Venture Capital Group client manager, the Sales Connections team, and our industry networks marketing resource manager truly simplifies the experience and makes it easier to work with IBM," he concluded. "Without their insight, we would not have been able to accomplish as much as we have."
In the past, WebLayers marketed and sold its solution primarily to customers in North America. It is now looking to penetrate the European market, targeting major companies in Germany, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Switzerland, and the UK.
"For a small company trying to generate opportunities abroad, a nod of approval from IBM goes a long way," Patel said. "Without that validation, we would have to invest a lot more time, money, and resources and still would not have the credibility that our association with IBM gives us." As it is, doors are opening for the team of IBM and WebLayers.
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