Recent News
IBM Unveils Industry Skills Initiatives to Help Business Partners Boost Sales
November 09, 2010
Barcelona, Spain and Austin, TX—November 9, 2010 – Ascendant Technology is pleased to announce it’s acceptance in the IBM Industry Skills Initiative program, within the Healthcare industry. As a further enabler for software business partners to drive high-margin sales, IBM has rolled out this new skill initiative designed to help partners capture their piece of the $2.4 trillion information technology opportunity.
The initiatives are focused on providing training and resources to help partners build skills for specific industries including financial services, telecommunications, healthcare, retail and energy and utilities. As a result of the dramatic growth in security requirements across these industries, IBM partners can for the first time achieve cross-industry authorization to sell security solutions based on IBM software.
“We consider the IBM Software Value Plus Industry Authorization certification a new competitive advantage,” said Jim Deters, President of Ascendant Technology. “It provides our business more profitable channel opportunities and an important designation in the marketplace that IBM certifies Ascendant Technology’s business acumen in addition to our technical excellence.”
Ascendant Technology has vast experience working with both payers and providers within the Healthcare industry. Most of this work has been centered on delivering exceptional web experiences to patients and members of health insurance plans. Having worked on externally facing portals for 14 of the BCBS organizations across the US and for Unimed in Brazil, Atech created Ascendant’s Healthcare Member Portal Framework, which includes the following assets that help us deliver a faster time to market with IBM Software.
Ascendant’s Exceptional Healthcare Member Experience Framework:
- Healthcare industry assets
- Patient and Member Portal best practices
- WebSphere Portal and WCM Best Practices
- Ascendant’s IDEA Framework (Insight Driven Engineering Approach)
- Reusable visual simulations (iRise) that demonstrate key healthcare member portal initiatives
- Reusable Portlets
- Reusable WCM templates (Web Content Management)
- Reference SOA Architecture
IBM’s Industry Authorization initiative is designed for resellers and system integrators with deep industry skills and solutions built with IBM software. This new initiative is an extension of IBM Software Value Plus program, announced earlier this year, that helps software partners build sales, technical and marketing skills on IBM’s software portfolio.
