Collaboration is where IT's at: How IT vendors can increase customer satisfaction and grow more rapidly by building successful alliance ecosystems

By Danielle James

For IT vendors, alliances with global systems integrators (GSIs) are often an under-utilized opportunity. Whether you have an alliance ecosystem, or are just getting started, this is one of the most highly profitable places to focus your attention.

As a CEO, an alliance professional or a sales executive, this book will show you how to:

• Language: English
• Publisher: Collaboration Nation
• Release date: Mar 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781922357212

Danielle James

Danielle James is an entrepreneurial big-picture thinker with a Bachelor of Science, who started her career in the IT industry in 1995. She has held management positions in APAC for large, medium and startup vendors such as IBM, Oracle, ONYX Software, Infor and Ephesoft, and in 1997 co-created and launched a decision support software product called TopDec. With experience in direct business-to-business solutions sales, challenger sales, and marketing, Danielle adapted naturally to work with alliances as her career unfolded. She has taken a particular interest in partnerships between IT vendors and Global Systems Integrators (such as Deloitte, Accenture, Wipro and TCS) because of the significant strategic clout these alliances deliver in terms of financial return for the participants, as well as in terms of customer outcomes and professional growth. Founder of Collaboration Nation, a global consulting services business based in Sydney, Australia, Danielle speaks, coaches, trains and mentors her clients in their development of successful alliance partner ecosystems. In her spare time, she loves to immerse herself in nature, be with loved ones (of both the two- and the four-legged variety), read, write, and think about how to improve the world for everyone and everything in it.

Book preview

Preface

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This book is for CEOs, executives; senior managers; and alliance, sales, marketing, services and customer success professionals working for IT product vendors, which includes independent software vendors (ISVs) and hardware vendors. There are many excellent books about sales and marketing, some great books on collaboration and several wonderful books about strategic alliances for all industries; however, none that I could find on strategic alliances between IT vendors and GSIs specifically for the IT vendor audience. I stand beside these other authors in our shared quest to further best practice for the alliance profession as a whole.

Partner management in IT has its history in reseller relationships, whereas this book is about a different kind of partner relationship: strategic alliances with global systems integrators (GSIs) such as Deloitte, KPMG, EY, Wipro and TCS to name but a handful.

I wrote this book for three reasons:

1)IT vendor CEOs on the whole are committed to these alliances. However, they are less knowledgeable about them than they are about other business units such as sales and marketing. My hope is for this book to sufficiently increase their understanding of this type of partnership so that they are better able to support their alliance teams, improve their return on investment in alliances, increase their customer satisfaction scores and radically reduce the very real risk to their company’s reputation of ‘getting it wrong’.

2)Because the profession of alliance manager or alliance director is relatively new in IT and there is scant little out there in the public domain regarding industry standards or professional techniques. I want to start an industry-wide conversation that I hope never ends, just like there is an ongoing industry conversation about sales methodologies. Far from having all the answers, I hope this book facilitates a sharing of ‘best practice’ amongst IT industry alliance professionals and the other functions within IT vendors that rely on them. Sharing between alliance managers is limited because they are, in effect, competing against each other for the time and attention of their respective alliance partners. I wanted to shed some light on this secret art for the benefit of all alliance professionals.

3)One of the greatest challenges facing alliance professionals is that other business units are inexperienced in partnering with GSIs which can undermine their considerable efforts when building these partnerships. My hope is that the leaders from other closely connected business units such as sales, marketing, services and customer success will read this book to improve the quality of the collaboration between the alliance function and their functions.

I would like to see IT companies partner well because I am passionate about innovation and customer outcomes and I’d like IT vendors to learn from my experiences, so together we can improve the standard of strategic partnerships across what is one of the youngest industries on earth. This, in turn, should also assist GSIs in their partnering efforts with IT vendors.

It helps that I like writing and sharing ideas that benefit others. I’ve learnt from a variety of sources, including fellow alliance directors. Most of what I have learnt about managing alliances with GSIs is from first-hand experience, and I’ve learnt more from my mistakes than I have from my victories. I have been inspired and disillusioned in equal measure by both my own and my colleagues’ endeavours in the alliances arena. Interestingly, my most dispiriting experiences have all related to values and culture.

It is no coincidence therefore that my work in the alliances arena has reinforced for me that a company’s culture and values, as championed (or not) by its senior-most leaders, is the lifeblood of an enterprise. That enterprise can operate with a low red blood cell count or high blood pressure for a while, but inevitably the words, actions and intentions pumping through the veins of a company will determine its health. On the other hand, working with alliances has brought me some of the most satisfying moments of my career, those moments which are absolutely champagne worthy, such as:

●When everyone internally buys into the just-completed alliance plan and the sales team feels heard because they were consulted in detail about it.

●When a potential new alliance partner accepts a proposal to explore a partnership together.

●When our team presents one of our products to a new alliance partner and the response is an emphatic ‘This is great! Our clients could really benefit from this. Let’s work