Seeing Double: The 2017 IBM Beacon Awards!
IBM held its annual IBM PartnerWorld Leadership Conference (PWLC) this week in Las Vegas from February 13-15. As part of PWLC, Mark III was fortunate to pickup two of the prestigious 2017 IBM Beacon Awards for the categories of Outstanding Storage Solution and Outstanding Solution Developed on Bluemix.
IBM Beacon Awards are given each year at PWLC to the top IBM Business Partners worldwide for each of 19 different solution categories. For Mark III, with the many thousands of IBM partners worldwide, winning two of these categories is a very significant milestone for us and an honor we share with our incredible clients.
From our point of view, being honored with two Beacon Awards is especially important this year, as all industries are in the middle of a significant transformation, led by rapidly changing digital and cognitive initiatives that are literally rewriting the winners and losers in each industry. At Mark III, we see our role as helping to guide both our new and long-time clients through this time of rapid change, whether it be helping to modernize and optimize a critical tech stack in the datacenter, or collaborating and building a cognitive prototype that will lead to new revenue streams for our partners/clients running on-premise or in the cloud.
As an example, our Outstanding Storage Solution award was given to Mark III for our work with a client on a digital video storage and archive on-premise cloud, enabling our client to modernize their video storage capabilities, while positioning them for a future of expanded video usage and analytics. Our Outstanding Solution Developed on Bluemix was for our work in building a Cognitive Call Center platform that can be used to bring cognitive insights to enterprises and software partners that operate call centers.
These Beacon Awards span across the IBM stack from IBM Cloud to IBM Watson to IBM Systems and are a great vote of confidence from IBM in that ongoing journey to provide that very guidance to our joint clients, all while leveraging Mark III's very unique capabilities.
For virtually all of our two decade history, we've been known to the IBM ecosystem as one of the top "True Blue" partners, in how we are able to pull together "solutions" using all the components of the IBM portfolio, including systems, storage, networking, software, and middleware, all wrapped with services and "above and beyond" ongoing support and operational assistance.
While this "horizontal" approach of building solutions still continues to work well for many clients (and one we've continued to expand our capabilities in, especially around modernization and optimization in the datacenter), we're seeing that many new digital use cases, especially those that involve cognitive approaches, require a "vertical" approach in building the stack. Although there is some crossover with some technologies from the horizontal approach (such as with Systems/Storage/Data Layer/etc), the "vertical" approach often spans upward into areas that are relatively unfamiliar to most in the ecosystem, including skills like amazing code, product innovation, UX design, data science, and raw creative business strategy acumen for digital approaches.
Accordingly, this is what we've built the future of Mark III around... the ability to understand and assist with the past, present, and future, with unique skills that can bring true value no matter if a "horizontal," modernization approach is needed, or if a "vertical," prototyping one is required (or a "full stack" combination of the two!).
Welcome to the Era of the New Cognitive Partner. We're ready.