IBM Canada Sweetens Education And Training Deal

December 10, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Big Blue’s subsidiary in the Great White North not only wants you to build your IT skills, it wants to make a little dough helping you do it. But sometimes, if you want to get a little, you have to give a little.

And so IBM Canada is offering customers who pre-pay for training slightly higher discounts if they pony up bigger wads of cash–enumerated in loonies, not greenbacks–over the next several months. In announcement letter ENUS312-137, IBM is offering customers who spend between $25,000 or more on Education Packs a 15 percent discount off that training. Under the normal prepaid tiers, as you can see here, IBM doesn’t give any discounts if you spend under $10,000 on Education Packs, and you get 5 percent if you spend between $10,000 and under $25,000. Above that, IBM gives 10 percent off for customers who prepay for between $25,000 and $49,999, 11 percent for between $50,000 and $99,999, and 12 percent for anything above $100,000. Under the new deal, any Education Pack training that you buy that costs $25,000 or more in the aggregate will get a 15 percent discount right off the top.

The Education Pack training covers all platforms and software that Big Blue sells, as well as lots of third-party tools that customers typically run on IBM systems. The Education Pack funds you pre-pay can be used for training at IBM’s facilities, for training when IBM staff come to your site, or for training you get over the Internet.

This discount was announced on December 5, 2012, and runs through February 22, 2013. While this deal is not being made to other countries in the Americas or EMEA regions, it should be and if you are prepaying for education and training, you should demand the same deal regardless of whether or not your IBM region or country is offering it. Take off, eh?