IBM’s Partner Plus program is growing. Analysts now estimate that around 55,000 participating firms, from global SIs to cloud-native boutiques, are demonstrating the breadth and depth of the ecosystem. Partners receive curated training, co-sell investments, and marketplace prioritization that help save time to revenue.
The addressable pie is also expanding rapidly. The managed services industry is estimated to expand from US$330.37bn in 2025 to US$878.71bn by 2032 as firms outsource the upkeep and security of hybrid-cloud environments. In the meantime, end-user SaaS investment is projected to reach nearly US$300 billion by 2025, growing the integration and data-protection attack surface that partners must defend.
Winning partners combine Red Hat OpenShift and Ansible with watsonx and retrieval-augmented AI patterns. Adoption? Some key data shows OpenShift Virtualization customers expanding by 178% since 2024 – VM lift-and-shift is still proving to be the easiest on-ramp to cloud-native apps. But how the implementation will play out still depends on security. Two-thirds of engineering teams postpone releases due to Kubernetes security concerns, so DevSecOps expertise continues to be a differentiator.
An IBM study finds that the majority of organizations are still experimenting with AI, but 80% have completed pilots and expect to roll out full-scale implementations in a year. Customers today expect stage-gated value tracking, not slide-ware. Partners who get certified early on watsonx models, embedded observability, and packaged repeatable use cases in models will play this wave. But for those in the IBM Partner Ecosystem, the playbook is straightforward: certify, co-build, secure, and deliver value faster than the market can shift.
