Brendan A. Fitzpatrick
IBM Cloud · 2022

Partner Center | Sell

Enhancing and accelerating the IBM Cloud partner experience.

$7.94M
in monthly recurring revenue contribution · partner onboarding compressed from 6–9 months to 6–8 weeks
RoleDesign Team Lead
CollaboratorsAngela Runge (user research, throughout) · three front-end engineering teams across two countries · three product management teams
RecognitionIBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Award

Problem

ISV partners are crucial for IBM Cloud — and had been underserved for years. The existing tool, Resource Management Console, was a nightmarish onboarding experience. New partners faced 6–9 months of work just to get into the catalog. Installable software couldn’t be onboarded at all.

Insight

The slowness wasn’t a UI problem dressed up — it was the wrong tool. Resource Management Console was built to manage IBM resources internally; we were asking it to invite outsiders in. Once Angela Runge’s research surfaced what partners actually needed at each step, the strategy became obvious: build a purpose-built onboarding engine and migrate every partner onto it.

Solution

Partner Center | Sell: a highly efficient partner onboarding engine, replacing Resource Management Console. ISV service onboarding migrated over. Installable software onboarding (as opposed to SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS) shipped for the first time on IBM Cloud in November 2020. The 6–9 month onboarding became 6–8 weeks.

6–8 wks
Partner onboarding time — down from 6–9 months
$7.94M
MRR contribution for accounts who create software, trending upward
First on IBM Cloud
Onboarding for installable software shipped November 2020
The Partner Center Sell overview screen on IBM Cloud, showing why-sell / who's-eligible / what's-involved content and three selling options (services, software, consulting).
The Sell overview — the entry point for ISVs onboarding to the IBM Cloud catalog.

Inside the tool

The work of Partner Center isn’t the marketing surface — it’s the back-room product editor where a partner actually does the onboarding. A few moments from inside the build.

The 'My products' list in Partner Center — three placeholder products (Service, Software, Deployable architecture) with status, type, and last-updated columns, and a Create button.
My products · the partner’s working roster of catalog entries
A product-details page in its empty state — Add logo, Select category, placeholder description, and a Catalog tile preview on the right showing what the empty entry will render as.
Empty state · the entry has actionable defaults, not an empty form
The same product-details page mid-edit — a logo URL has been pasted in, Save and Cancel actions are visible, the catalog-tile preview still shows the un-saved state.
Editing · live preview to the right shows pre-save vs post-save
The same product-details page after publishing — a real product logo (a weather-cloud icon) now renders in both the form and the catalog-tile preview.
Published · the same screen, the partner’s asset live in the tile
The process was smooth and painless. ISV partner AnonTech, on onboarding ViziVault to the IBM Cloud catalog
Compared to other clouds, IBM offers the most straightforward user experience. ISV partner Turbonomic, on onboarding a Red Hat OpenShift Operator
IBM Cloud’s previous onboarding tool had no involvement from design, resulting in an extremely complex user experience that few people could understand. Brendan was highly engaged from the project’s inception and helped the development and OM teams in different geographic locations come together and understand the problem from our users’ perspective. He was the key leader and my counterpart within design — helping our teams refine the user flows through many iterations. The result was a new IBM Cloud Partner Center that has had excellent user feedback and delighted our users. STSM, Common Cloud Services

Partner Center continues to take on new responsibilities in helping partners do business with IBM Cloud and its customers — and I’m still actively involved.

← All work