Attending IBM’s Partnerworld Leadership Conference, I have been immersed in IBM plans for transforming itself based on a vision of a rapidly changing world for IBM itself and its clients. The characterization being used by the management team, led by Gini Rometty, is a transition to a world of business dominated by (big) data, cloud, and systems of engagement.

These three have to be considered as trigonometric vectors, where businesses are transitioning from operations that can be defined by the relative absence of these:

Data — As one indicator of where companies are starting from, Martin Schoeder, IBM’s CFO, stated that CFO’s today still rely on intuition (14%) and spreadsheets (52%), and only 44% are using other technologies.

Cloud — Companies are starting to adopt the use of the cloud, and transition away from running  low-cost on premise servers. Witness IBM’s recent sale of the x86 server business to Lenovo, and the acquisition of Softlayer, which emulates those servers in the cloud.

Systems of Engagement — As a social has displaced broadcast, we are seeing the rise of marketing, customer support, and sales systems that engage directly with highly scaled numbers of customers. This is displacing systems of record style apps, and it is very early days.

This is a 30,000 foot view, and not a critique of the strategy, which I agree with. What I want to talk about is the channel of resellers and partners, and whether they have a place in IBM’s future.

Imagine for a moment an alternate history for Amazon,  where they started as Barnes&Noble, and were very successful. But the Bezos in this alternate universe sees the future — online retailing — and he decides to disrupt his own successful business instead of letting someone else do it. So, he would try to continue to get value from the existing stores for as long as possible, even while building ecommerce in the cloud. And at some point, he would start to sell off parts of the old business, and closing stores. This is the answer to Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma: to disrupt your own business, proactively.

The analogy here is IBM as the alternate Barnes&Noble, seeing a future in which local, brick-and-mortar stores make a less critical role: the ‘stores’ are the local resellers and partners, who have been selling x86 servers and loading IBM software onto them for end users. And before that, they were selling and installing IBM PCs, and provisioning them. IBM has sold both those lines to Lenovo.

IBM’s pitch is that these channel companies can switch from x86 server sales — selling boxes — to selling a box-as-a-service: Softlayer, which IBM recently acquired.

But after a while, once these channel partners have transitioned their community from on-premise servers to moving into the cloud, what will they sell, and why would people buy it from them?

My sense is this is the disruptive inflection point for IBM, and that the channel will be the ones that ultimately get whipsawed by it, unless they start running faster than IBM. Just as in our alternate universe Barnes&Noble scenario, the alternate Bezos would not start the transformation of the company by telling the store and regional managers that someday in the not-too-distant future that they would have to dramatically retrain themselves to operate in a cloud ecommerce company, or face separation. No, he’d lay the big picture of the future out — as IBM’s executives have done — and describe how the alternate Barnes&Noble would have to respond: to turn itself into Amazon, and to serve the end customer who wants to buy books online.

To be totally fair, I think IBM — just like the alternate Barnes&Noble — has no choice. The writing is on the wall. The world that they envision *is* coming to pass. They must rework their operations — from top to bottom — around the imperatives of that coming reality. And by articulating that vision clearly, they are doing a great service for the community of IBM’s end customers, who can emulate IBM and prepare for the new normal (when there is no normal).

But the channel is caught in the pincers of this inexorable logic. If they game out the options, they have only a few: to become more deeply skilled in these new technologies, and to build a reputation on 1/ helping companies make the transition to the cloud, or 2/ to help them grapple with the application of big data, or 3/ become expert at one or more aspects of the new systems of engagement. The old skills of working on physical hardware — servers, networks, and other gear — is just less relevant, and as cloud computing increasingly diverges from virtualized representations of physical hardware, will become obsolete. The ‘transition to the cloud’ skillset will have the least longevity, so I would recommend to any channel partners to focus on 2 or 3 as soon as possible, even while doing 1 in the near term to keep the lights on.

So, as I said, IBM is making the right moves — although it’s going to be a good trick to make that elephant agile, loose, and fast — and its clients and channel partners all need to take a page from the new IBM strategy manual, and become part of the transformation IBM is pursuing, instead of the parts left behind.

Behind the scenes, IBM’s leaders know that this tough love for the channel is necessary, so that those partners can start running faster immediately, and not be blindsided by the coming transformation.