I received an email from Frank Casillo, Director of Marketing, Agilysys. I am simply pasting this email in as it says it all.

Hi Robert - In a recent blog post, you wrote "I want you to help me by sharing your stories about great things that Vendors are doing to help VARs in today's world of economic uncertainty." Please consider the following post from me as an example of what IBM is doing to help Agilysys uncover new opportunities in these tough times.

IBM Helping Agilysys Build Skills Needed to Capture 21st Century Opportunities

There’s no arguing that we’re in the midst of challenging economic times. However, with more than $787 billion dollars in economic stimulus funding on the table in the U.S. alone, many jobs and technology opportunities will develop as a result of initiatives for healthcare reform and building "smarter", more energy efficient infrastructures and data centers, for example.

What I like about being an IBM Business Partner is that they recognized early on that their Business Partners needed a broader set of skills to enter sales engagements that will enable them to capitalize on these new opportunities, versus just selling point product offerings.

Agilysys is one of the first IBM Business Partners to be certified in the IBM Dynamic Infrastructure Specialty Program, a new initiative IBM launched to help its partners develop and deepen skills needed to better respond to clients’ business and IT transformational needs in key business challenge areas.

Agilysys achieved IBM’s Specialty Certification in virtualization and consolidation and is pursuing certification for energy efficiency and business resilience. This helps us show clients that we have the competencies needed to solve business and service delivery problems through the integration of processes and infrastructure.

Gaining these skills is important and meets a growing requirement for virtually every business. Today's physical infrastructures are becoming instrumented with sensors embedded in almost anything, from cars, appliances and livestock to cameras and pipelines. At the same time, the Internet is allowing all of this embedded computing to be interconnected, leading to a trillion connected and intelligent things.

IDC estimates the market opportunity for the software, servers, technologies and services to manage the world's converged IT and physical infrastructure to be $122 billion by 2012.

To help IBM Business Partners grab their piece of this opportunity, the Dynamic Infrastructure Specialty Program offers sales, marketing and technical support and makes available up to $100,000 in business development funds. Agilysys has so far received $25,000 that we plan to use to expand our marketing efforts around dynamic infrastructure.

Even in today’s difficult environment, businesses are willing to invest in IT solutions -- if they cut costs, drive efficiency and productivity, preserve capital and create competitive advantage. And that’s exactly what a dynamic infrastructure helps them do. The Dynamic Infrastructure Specialty Program will allow Agilysys to continue to enhance our skills and provide higher value solutions to our customers.

IBM is proving to Agilysys that there’s no better partner to have during these challenging -- and exciting -- times.

Thanks,