By Steve Hilton
As the technology world changes, so too do partners’ business models. Sometimes acquisitions and hiring just aren’t options. Let’s be honest, not every partner has access to capital to acquire another firm or the ability to take on the risks of expanding staff. This is where partnering presents a viable transformation option.
Why is partnering happening? There are three main reasons:
- Partnering maximizes strengths and diversifies away the weaknesses of a single technology services company. Each party in a partnership leverages its strengths for the benefit of the team. And each partner gets to hide some of their weaknesses in the guise of partnership. In Business School jargon, it’s a “win-win."
- Partnering eases the challenges of finding qualified IT talent. Finding unqualified talent is easy. Finding the right talent to fill-in a hole in your portfolio — especially in a hot technology area like cloud, mobility or managed services — is difficult and expensive.
- Partnering changes the costs associated with making a sale from fixed to variable. Lowering costs is key in these economic conditions. Since the costs associated with partnering generally are correlated with increases in sales activities, partnering has a higher variable cost component than other transformational approaches. There are some upfront costs required to make a partnership viable, but you incur the real costs when spending time working on qualified sales leads together.
So where are we seeing these types of partnerships between agents, dealers, VARs and the like?
We’re beginning to find these types of partnerships in countries where communications and IT have already become intertwined. Cloud services — a great example of communications meets IT — are growing strongly in countries like Finland, France, Denmark and the United States. These integrated solutions require unique implementation skills which are best provided by specialists. According to Analysys Mason forecasts, by the year 2016, 29 percent of all cloud services worldwide ($11.7 billion) will be supplied by technology partners like VARs, agents, dealers and system integrators.
We’re also finding these types of partnerships in emerging world countries like Brazil, India and China — markets where finding qualified IT talent still can be rather difficult.
