IBM, which expects to unveil better-than-expected quarterly figures, has announced it will spend some of its cash on incentives to encourage some of its largest partners to invest more in training and other areas.

On Wednesday, the company introduced a scheme to help its business partners who are cooperating on its New Enterprise Data Center strategy. The scheme involves incentives for IBM partners to improve their knowledge in three specific areas: virtualization and consolidation; energy efficiency; and business resiliency.

And Mike Bernard, general business and channels marketing leader at IBM, told ZDNet.co.uk that there is also a fourth area under consideration, but not yet announced: information infrastructure.

"Skills in those areas are what's most needed," Bernard said. "From that the clients will benefit as well as the partners."

There are two levels of incentive for training that partners can apply for: general specialty, for which they will receive $25,000, and specialty elite, for which they get $100,000.

Bernard said the scheme was open to any qualifying partner. "There is no qualification other than that they are undertaking work in the chosen areas. They do that and they qualify and they get the money for it," he said.

MySpace has unveiled "MyAds," an advertising technology focused on small businesses and individuals rather than the huge brand advertisers that the News Corp.-owned social network is best known for. It's a platform in which an advertiser can allocate exactly how much to spend--between $25 ad $10,000--and target its audience using the HyperTargeting system that MySpace debuted just under a year ago.

With HyperTargeting, MySpace says that there are more than 1,100 specific ways to target an ad based on geography, demographics, interests, and other information sourced from public profile data. Advertisers can then keep tabs on performance through online analytics.

MyAds is currently restricted to MySpace in the U.S., where it has about 76 million members.

The "self-service" model is similar to what Facebook has done with its own ad platform--create an ad, choose how much to spend, select a target audience. But MySpace has a more obvious clientele in mind: bands. The MyAds homepage explicitly recommends the service for band promotion, something that gets very close to MySpace's roots as an independent music hub.