Although enterprise computing dominated the conversation at IBM Pulse last month, companies with fewer than 1,000 employees still constitute the fastest growing segment of the technology stalwart’s customer base, and it has not lost sight of that fact. That is reflected clearly in the messaging around SoftLayer, the managed hosting provider that Big Blue acquired in 2013 to compete more aggressively for small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) and address accelerating public cloud adoption among its largest clients.

SoftLayer took center stage at Pulse, which saw the debut of several new services and technologies that IBM vice president of mid-market marketing Heidi Dethloff predicts will serve as a growth catalyst for her firm. The vision, as she detailed in an interview on theCUBE, is to help SMBs free up IT resources normally spent on keeping the lights on to drive business value.

“The shift that’s occurring right now is moving the back office to the front office. We as consumers are experiencing that today,” Dethloff tells hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante. “Technology and innovation are becoming so ubiquitous it’s like reaching for the phone and expecting to hear a dial tone, that’s the kind of thing the cloud is delivering to these small and medium business buyers.”

The benefits of cloud computing are so compelling, in fact, that many organizations have started mimicking the big providers in a bid to realize increased operational efficiencies. This trend is redefining delivery models in the mid-market and disrupting the value chain, according to Dethloff.

“These small and medium business buyers are starting to look very different to us, they’re becoming basically managed service providers,” she says. “Some would argue that’s really a channel, but from a mid-market perspective that’s the new client. So MSPs and cloud service providers are actually the new mid-market buyer for us, and that’s where a lot of the growth opportunity is for us too.”

With the cloud blurring the line between products and services, many of IBM’s channel partners are diversifying beyond their traditional revenue streams in an effort to keep up with the changing requirements of their customers. Big Blue is aware that this transformation has its fair share of bumps, Dethloff points out, and it’s actively working to smoothen the journey.

”It’s the traditional product-type resell, but now you’re talking about cloud, adding new services on top of the cloud. That’s a big shift for many of our business partners, so on the midmarket side we’re making sure that we’re offering them some of the workshops they need,” she elaborates. To date, over 3,000 partners have graduated from these workshops, which cover a wide range of topics in technology, business and marketing. The latter field in particular has been a pain point for the channel, especially with social media becoming an increasingly important element of B2B commerce.

Training is but one component of IBM’s multi-pronged channel enablement strategy, which also includes a co-marketing program that reimburses partners for up to 75 percent of their advertising expenses. The vendor also provides digital campaign templates that aim to take the hassle out of go-to-market planning and execution.

Internally, Big Blue subscribes to an “owned, earned, paid media” approach that focuses on pushing out the right content at the right place at the right time, as Dethloff puts it. And that goes beyond just targeting IT buyers. The company is also engaging practitioners directly through a partnership with Spiceworks, a business network that sets itself apart by providing integrations with popular solutions..

IBM also maintains a presence on Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin, but not all of its partners – especially the larger ones – are as comfortable with social networking tools. Dethloff laments that some business executives in the channel don’t even have personal profiles, let alone an organizational strategy. However, that is beginning to change as the value of customer engagement proves itself with tangible leads and sales. There remain challenges, namely the lacking measurability, but she expects that to improve over time.

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