Key takeaways from IBM Think partner event

The first week of May means flowers from April showers and that it’s time for IBM Think in Boston. The first day of the event has historically been the Partner Plus day, which is devoted to content for IBM partners, which include ISVs, technology partners and resellers. The 2025 keynote was kicked off by Kareem Yusuf, senior vice president of ecosystem, strategic partners and initiatives at IBM. Below are my key takeaways from Partner Plus:

• Scaling is key to partner success. If one adopts the typical hockey stick adoption curve, there are a few IBM-related technologies on the cusp of hitting the shaft and growing rapidly, including hybrid cloud, observability and, of course, AI. Yusuf (pictured) talked about the key to scaling being driven by a “vibrant ecosystem defined as a community with a variety of rich participants working harmoniously towards a mutually beneficial outcome.” For IBM, this ecosystem is comprised of distributors, resellers, service partners and ISVs. IBM’s focus for this community is a combination of product innovation, go-to-market strategies, and new product innovations featuring technology acquisitions. It’s interesting to note that scaling AI will require partners to use AI to automate many of the mundane processes that typically slow businesses down.
• Advancing agentic AI requires showcasing capabilities. During his keynote, Yusuf discussed the importance of agentic AI and its integration into classic products such as DB2 and Planning Analytics. To elaborate on these capabilities, Parul Mishra, vice president of AI productivity for IBM, joined Yusuf on stage. She discussed what the next wave of work would look like. Mishra explained: “Agentic AI has opened a new wave of productivity for all of us. We will move away from rule-based automation engines to conversational agents.” She added, “We are now part of an AI agent fabric where they can think, plan and act.”

At Think, IBM announced several innovations in agentic AI including a build your own agent framework, pre-built domain agents, integrations with leading applications such as Adobe, AWS, Microsoft and ServiceNow, agent orchestration and observability. The company also introduced the new Agent Catalog in watsonx Orchestrate to simplify access to 150+ agents and prebuilt tools from IBM and its ecosystem partners. If advancing AI requires use cases, IBM has them in spades and that should benefit it and its customers.

• Integrated experiences for cross-sell and upsell. Yusuf pivoted the keynote back to joint success and discussed how it was critical to deliver integrated product experiences and common pricing. Jenny Fitzgerald, director of application observability and resilience, joined the stage to provide more details on this topic. She talked about unlocking customer value with a unified experience across multiple products and gave an example of Instanta and Concert. The former is IBM’s observability product, which customers use to ensure their apps are running smoothly and catch issues before they impact the business. She showed how, through a common user interface, customers could pivot to Concert to check out the resilience posture of the application. There are also hooks into third-party tools between Instana and Concert to create an integrated experience. This helps the IBM Partner community “land” a customer but then easily upsell other products. Common pricing is critical to ensure customers understand what they are paying for and there is some consistency from partner to partner.
• There is plenty of gold in the Java hills. The topic of Java does not have the same sizzle factor that AI or cloud does, but it’s a massive market that’s stood the test of time. Still, some businesses are facing an upcoming migration challenge. To explain, Mark Haberkorn, vice president of WebSphere and runtimes came on stage. “Customers are having a bit of a Y2K like issue with Java 8 ending community support. Many customers rely on the community to support their applications and open-source libraries and now will need to move from Java 8 to something else,” Haberkorn said.

One of the biggest challenges is that most of the Java 8 applications have not been touched for decades and could have been built by teams that are no longer around, creating a big problem. To help with this, IBM has turned to AI to create three possible solutions. The first is automating the upgrade of the app to run on Java 17 without changing any of the WebSphere operation. The second is to migrate the application to the cloud in a hosted IBM environment and run it there. The third is to use AI-based tooling to understand the state of the application and then migrate the application to a new end state. On stage, Haberkorn ran a demo of Java 8 being modernized with just a few mouse clicks.