In effort to drive growth in cloud computing, analytics and social business, IBM is offering new incentives for its business partners to help them bring the latest technology to their clients and drive growth in specific markets.

With analytics and cloud computing continuing to change how businesses operate, there come additional opportunities for businesses to provide new services that combine technology with industry expertise, IBM officials said.

The IBM Solution Accelerator incentive is a new channel incentive for selling combined software and systems and/or business solutions. The incentive has two elements:

Software and Systems Reward: A 5 percent incremental rebate for selling eligible IBM systems and a 15 percent incremental rebate for selling eligible software together to a single client.

Business Solutions Reward: An additional 10 percent rebate for selling a solution aimed at a particular IT challenge on the eligible software content of the solution. The eligible solutions cover client needs such as turning information into insights, managing risk, security and compliance and social business.

IBM officials said the incentives are part of a larger effort to provide comprehensive technology services to its business partners and their customers.

“Commerce, social business, cloud computing and analytics are all multi-billion dollar industries and we want to ensure that our business partners have the resources, skills and support they need to succeed in these markets,” said Mark Register, vice president of software business partners, IBM. “These new incentives are designed to help our business partners grow their businesses and continue to work with us to deliver simplified approaches to the complex challenges our clients are facing.”

In addition, IBM said that approximately 1 percent in fees can be earned when clients finance their solution through IBM Global Financing.

“Our clients want solutions not piece-parts,” said Ernie Yenke, president of Lighthouse Computing Services, an IBM Business Partner. “This new incentive from IBM will help grow our business while delivering solutions that combine hardware, software and business-specific solutions that help address client needs.”

The incentives for IBM business partners include: a new SaaS referral incentive for the Intelligent Operations Center Cloud offering and will be rewarded 15 percent of the annual contract value of the sale; and business partners working on smarter cities projects that are part of IBM’s Software Value Plus Program, can access zero percent, 12-month, interest-free financing from IBM Global Financing.  

IBM estimates that smarter commerce and social business are a $20 billion opportunity for software alone. IBM is helping its business partners to sell SaaS solutions for Smarter Commerce to their clients with IBM and obtain 15 percent of the annual contract value.

In addition, according to Forrester Research, the market for social enterprise apps and related services will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 61 percent to become a $6.4 billion market in 2016. To take advantage of the market, certain IBM Business Partners selling SaaS offerings to small or mid-sized companies can earn a 28 percent rebate when they sell IBM SmartCloud for Social Business.

In other IBM news, the Armonk, N.Y.-based technology company cut more than 1,000 jobs in North America this week, according to Alliance@IBM, an advocacy group for the company’s employees that is tied to the Communications Workers of America, Forbes reported. As of Dec. 31, 2011, IBM had 426,751 employees.