Forbes Innovation Cloud The Spectrum Of IT Partnerships Adrian Bridgwater Senior Contributor Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. I track enterprise software application development & data management. Following Feb 26, 2023, 07:08am EST | Press play to listen to this article! Got it! Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin TURIN, ITALY - FEBRUARY 11: Marylin Pla and Yannick Bonheur of France compete in the Pairs Short .
. . [+] Program Figure Skating event during Day 1 of the Turin 2006 Winter Olympic Games on February 11, 2006 at the Palavela in Turin, Italy.
(Photo by Stephen Munday/Getty Images) Getty Images Vendors sell software. Enterprise technology vendors build software applications, suites, operating systems, tools and platforms in order to clinch sales deals with customers who pay them for their products, services and ongoing support and maintenance. The vendor is the seller and the purchasing organization is the customer.
It’s that simple. Except not always. Some software vendors like to label the sales deal they strike with their customers as a ‘partnership’ these days.
It’s a way for vendors to tell us that their customers are at the center of what they do and that their users’ operational roadmaps unequivocally dictate the way the software products they build are developed. In fairness, a good enterprise software vendor does shape its tools to the roadmap of its customers, but does the act of labelling vendor-buyer relationships as a partnership go too far into fawning familiarity? It’s probably not as marketing spun as it sounds in many cases i. e.
for a major world-famous soccer club to list some of its technology vendors as partners (and there is one that does ), it will have invested a good amount of analysis into checking whether the strength of its own brand would be harmed or helped by such an association. There is clearly a spectrum of technology partnerships, so how does this story play out? The non-partner purchase Think about your own personal purchasing patterns. When you go to Walmart for beer, bread and bananas, the store manager doesn’t greet you when you leave and say, “Thanks for being a Walmart partner, we value you.
” When you take your car to the garage for a service, you haven’t suddenly become a Toyota (other automobiles are also available) partner, have you? When you go to the dentist for a filling, have you become a Chatfield Dental partner with Dr. Pakan (full disclosure, he’s a great dentist) overnight? Actually, you might view your dentist with that much emotional proximity, but you get the point i. e.
when we purchase, we pay, we don’t partner up. MORE FOR YOU Meet The Unknown Immigrant Billionaire Betting Her Fortune To Take On Musk In Space Travel Tips - Why “Guaranteed Departures” Are Important For Your Next Vacation Software Ate The World, But Not In The Way We Assume Despite this grounding, many technology vendors will partner with their customers and indeed each other. Many will work on symbiotic projects that could potentially incorporate customer feedback, it's standard industry partnership practice that happens on a massive multi-matrix basis.
The top five database companies on the planet all partner with each other at some level, even if it’s on a competitive level to help customers migrate from one platform to the other. There are clearly a wide variety of relationships between software vendors/service providers and customers. Some fall on the more transactional side of the spectrum.
Others, start to resemble what we could honestly call a partnership when undergirded by mutual long-term success. So just how broad is this spectrum? “Let’s be honest: many software vendors use the word ‘partnership’ too loosely. To give them the benefit of the doubt, the term is often used to depict a sentiment they are trying to portray - that they are solely there for customer needs,” said Al Dickson, director at Quod Orbis, a company focused on continuous control software security monitoring.
When do vendors go too far in using the term partnership? Dickson suggests it is when the services they are offering do not match the needs or expectations that the customer has of a ‘partner’. He further thinks that very often, vendors stumble when customers’ needs exceed those that the vendor can facilitate in a reasonable time scale. “The antidote to this scenario is a dose of radical honesty,” said Dickson.
“The customer has a need that the vendor is attempting to satisfy. Yes, that may include managed services, but the customer is always going to be the customer. Just because they have a need for service or software, it does not make the vendor an equal partner, regardless of what the vendor may honestly believe.
” Moving across the spectrum When can we safely say we’re moving across the spectrum to a better representation of a partnership? According to Vijay Iyer, senior vice president for digital transformation at Persistent Systems, the term ‘partnership’ has a very broad definition – however, the strongest definition, in his opinion, is when it benefits all the parties associated with the partnership – and those benefits can be measured and quantified. Another term that is now quite often used in the context of this discussion is the notion of an ecosystem. According to Iyer, usually, when a group of companies (software, cloud, service provider, end customer, their partners etc.
) come together to solve a set of problems, the term ecosystem becomes more relevant. A partner ecosystem with clearly defined objectives and business outcomes is probably at the right-end of the partnership spectrum. In balance then, he explains that ‘simply’ reselling one software product to an end customer is at the left-end of the partnership spectrum.
Iyer believes there are numerous permutations and combinations between these two ends. “The resale [left-end] example, though mutually benefiting both parties in some form, is just a transaction – something that’s short-lived, but an essential component of the software companies go-to-market initiative. In this transaction, there’s a software vendor with the product, a reseller with access to customers and markets - and a customer who benefits from purchasing that software.
There are numerous companies that play an important role of a reseller, especially when the software product company doesn’t have access to all the global markets,” said Persistent’s Iyer. A natural progression across the partnership spectrum would be where the reseller adds some value-added services on top of the software product and provides value to the customer that’s beyond just selling the software product. A typical example here would be to pre-configure the software to the needs of the customer and implement it for the customer.
Taking this a step further, Persistent, for example, embeds its software product into its reference architecture and creates a value proposition for the customer – who not only gets the software product, but a solution to one or more of their problem areas. If we look at Persistent's partnership with SummitAI – Persistent has built a solution to manage IT Operations called PiOps – and SummitAI is embedded in PiOPs as the ITSM component. In this model, the customer benefits from having a solution to solve a problem rather than just purchasing SummitAI.
Persistent takes the accountability of solving the customer’s problem, rather than just selling and implementing SummitAI. As the partnership spectrum expands and extends further, it goes beyond just solving a customer’s technology problem – it starts getting into solving business challenges. At this point, the objective is not to just solve a technology problem or problems but ensure that the solution being provided by the technologies involved solves a business challenge.
Ever-changing markets While partnership delivery models have existed for decades, in recent years – due to the increased complexity of customer organizations, their systems and the challenges they face in meeting the demands of an ever-changing market – they have become even more important. This is the opinion of Adam Tarbox, vice president for EMEA channel sales and ecosystems at Nutanix. “Now, more than ever, the deep relationships between vendors, partners and enterprise customers, are critical in delivering innovation and transformation.
At their heart is a culture where teams work together as one, sharing information and developing solutions to challenges collaboratively,” said Tarbox. The Nutanix VP suggests that the level of engagement required from each partner to help realize the full value for customers is dependent on the complexity of the solution a customer buys. However, customers now typically engage with at least seven partners across the lifecycle of any project and there are multiple touchpoints throughout the process – from those that engage early in the project cycle, offering advice and guidance, to those that engage through transactions, deliver services, transformation, training and so on, delivering a project can require an ecosystem of partners.
“The traditional model has been for vendors to only concern themselves with and reward the partners involved in actual transactions, forgetting the whole ecosystem around each deal and how it comes to life. When you start to think of the move to more subscription-based engagements and the whole area of customer lifecycle management, we need to think about how we deliver our software,” said Tarbox. The economics behind customer relationships is changing rapidly and vendors need to embrace this change.
Partnership revolutions Ruminating on how this discussion plays out in practical terms, Keri Gilder, chief executive officer, Colt Technology Services says that her firm has worked with three partners to create a blockchain-based carrier payment solution. The software was designed to fix a multi-billion Euros (the currency) industry problem by generating ‘first-time right invoices’ between carriers being onboarded onto the company’s platform. “As an industry, creating an ecosystem of partnerships, alliances and collaboration links between businesses is a catalyst for change, for good: both at the micro level, to transform, digitize and automate our processes and systems; and at the macro level, to improve our people, places and planet,” said Gilder.
“Nowhere is the partner ecosystem more powerful than at this level. Enterprise technology partnerships need diversity of thought and diversity of people to be truly transformational. ” She suggests that collectively, all organizations working as ‘partners’ (in whatever capacity across the spectrum being defined here) can take action to drive a future that is fairer, sustainable and more equitable for all.
This, she thinks, is where the power and potential of industry partnerships are actually quite revolutionary. A technology validation for partnerships Finally here then, if we’re talking about technology partnerships, let’s look for a technical validation for these unions. According to Donnie Berkholz, senior vice president for product at open source database platform specialist Percona, effective and productive technology partnerships are an extension of the community model that underpins open source itself.
“For companies built around open source software, partnerships differ because anyone can modify and redistribute the software. This makes it possible to partner effectively without the same level of formality required, because everyone can work on the source code in the open — no legal agreements required, in many cases. This also frees up vendors to choose exactly how to package that open source code into products, and apply their expertise and opinionated approach to cater to different sets of customers and use cases,” said Berkholz.
“For example, the end-of-life date for MySQL 5. 7 [an open source relational database management system] is later this year. However, we can choose to provide a longer support window with Percona Server for MySQL, as we did with MySQL 5.
6 . This is possible because open source software enables us to keep making changes to the source code for critical vulnerabilities and providing updated builds,” he added. For many then, the value of great partnerships is really not played out in glossy sponsorship deals (although those deals will continue to pervade), it is rather more a question of partners at the keyboard.
After all, pair programming is a core software application development methodology and there’s no reason that that kind of duality shouldn’t exist at a holistic enterprise level. There is surely a whole spectrum of partnerships in the technology space, so let’s try to focus on those where the dancers (and skaters) are most in sync and they’re gyrating for the greater good. Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn .
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