Welcome to Las Vegas! I wanted to take a few minutes to give you the 30,000-foot overview of what we have in store in the next two days, to help you navigate and attend the sessions and leadership exchanges that provide the most value to your specific business needs.

Here are highlights of what we will be presenting on Tuesday and Wednesday—the busiest days of the conference—both of which commence at 9 a.m. with opening remarks from IBM General Manager Mark Hennessy:

Making Markets: Tuesday, February 26 (General Sessions)

• Envisioning a Shared Agenda: Bruno Di Leo illustrates how the new era of big data and cloud computing is giving rise to a new type of IT buyer and opening up greenfield markets and opportunities, as illustrated by the success stories of IBM Business Partners like you.

• The Shared CIO/CXO Agenda: Jon Iwata explains how to help leaders across the C-Suite build a shared agenda and pave the way for enterprise transformation—as some predict CMOs will soon spend more on IT than their CIO counterparts.

• Turning Opportunities to Outcomes: Steve Mills spotlights IBM’s expansion initiative into new markets and new geographies, and shows how IBM Business Partners can leverage these investments to increase their profitability.

• Building and Leading New Markets: Mike Rhodin illustrates how IBM is engaging a fundamentally new type of client—CMOs, CFOs and others—to help them weave intelligence into their organizational processes and build fundamentally smarter businesses.

• Managing the Velocity of Change: Robert LeBlanc explains how market-leading middleware capabilities from IBM enable organizations to react in real time to increasingly rapid changes in market demands and conditions, giving Business Partners opportunities to deliver critical applications and look at new profit-generators.

• Teaming for Innovation and Growth with Services: Tim Shaughnessy will discuss how to expand your margins and minimize your investment in developing markets such as cloud computing, security and business resiliency, and talks about how IBM Global Technology Services and Business Partners can work together to pursue new opportunities.

Capturing Markets: Wednesday, February 27 (General Sessions)

• Smarter Computing: Rod Adkins provides an overview of IBM’s comprehensive, refreshed hardware portfolio and tells how it delivers Smarter Computing solutions that are Tomorrow-Ready: cloud-ready, data-ready and security-ready.

• Delivering Our Shared IBM & Business Partner Agenda: Mark Hennessy and Jim Corgel outline our common IBM and Business Partner agenda and share examples of teaming for success across the ecosystem.

• Running with GTS Services: Steve Sams explores the services opportunities for specific Business Partner types and describes how a partnership with IBM services enables you to embrace emerging opportunities to enhance your margins and take even better solutions to market.

• Accelerating Success with IBM Software: Mark Register presents key investments, programs, incentives and marketing initiatives that can help you expand your portfolio, enhance your sales team skills, accelerate success and become recognized as a high-value partner with outstanding deployment skills.

• Transforming STG Channels for Growth: Kristie Bell outlines plans to help channel partners capture market share and expand their businesses with increased sales and technical resources, improved margins and new digital demand-generation and lead management programs.

• Business Integrity – The Foundation of Our Shared Success: Sylvia Wong addresses the values that IBM and its Business Partners must share to win in today’s competitive marketplace.

Leadership Exchanges

Leadership Exchanges take place Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon. There are 15 topics available—covering such technology areas such as Smarter Cities, SmartCloud Foundations, Power Systems, PureSystems, Midmarket and Mobile Opportunities—so please choose to attend the four that interest you most. A complete list of topics and abstracts is now available on the PartnerWorld Leadership Conference website.

Wednesday night: Party time

Wednesday concludes with our epic party, featuring dinner, entertainment and a performance from Grammy Award-winning rock band Train on the main stage—after absorbing so much knowledge, this will be an ideal way to unwind and let the good times roll.

For more detailed information about our session schedules, visit the 2013 PartnerWorld Leadership Conference website—and plan to stay through Thursday for great guest speakers, including Ben Mezrich—Hollywood’s hottest tech author!

Jamie Mendez (@jamendez11)