What is the definition of a strategic partnership with a vendor?

In this post I try to outline a few features of what I would consider a strategic partnership with a service provider or a technology vendor.  These are thoughts that I have distilled from years of experience (good and bad) with my vendor partners. 

Hence this aspect of doing business cannot be overlook and not the least of these is the "cost" of doing business.

Here are a few key attributes, not necessarily in any particular order of preference.

1) the strategic partner relationship has to go beyond a transactional one to that of a more long term one
2) the strategic partner has to have skin in the game - they have to be measured with your success criteria - they can succeed only if you do
3) the strategic partner has to be willing to "share" their technology roadmap with you
4) the strategic partner has to allow you to re-shape their technology roadmap to meet your needs
5) the strategic partner relationship has to include making their test labs, test gear, professional services personnel available to you to expedite a critical path technology prototyping effort or to help test out a strategic technology concept

In summary, I would like to add that a healthy strategic vendor partnership is key to the success of not just a project or a business area (line of business) but also making IT a strategic partner for the business - especially in capturing lost business opportunity with the strategic and timely use of technology - key for this "always connected" social networking world!! 

I am curious to hear from you about your experiences to this effect.
Thanks.
surekha -

Comments

  1. Mahi InampudiMay 14, 2011 at 6:44 AM

    Great post!! I agree. The only thing that bothers me dealing with vendors sales or account managers is their "focus". I understand they want to increase their foot print and sell more of different tech products. I usually prefer vendors that give equal or more focus to what's already on my tech landscape and help me make it successful and more reliable in solving business problems.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Surekha DurvasulaMay 29, 2011 at 9:00 AM

    Mahi - I understand your concerns. I tried to offer a couple of options that are to some extent from my own experience ... not sure if they address your concerns.

    http://entarch.blogspot.com/2011/05/how-to-take-transaction-based-vendor.html

    surekha -

    ReplyDelete
  3. SkumarJuly 21, 2011 at 11:18 AM

    Surekha

    I am skeptical abt point # 4. How many vendors would be willing to change their road-map for you? I am not sure if that is a valid precondition for a strategic partnership.

    Again, skin in the game - ofcourse - being paid for the efforts is what their skin is.

    Additionally, a strategic partnership would
    - Be professional and business-like
    - help you succeed. Your success is as important to them as getting paid.
    - if they dont have a solution, say so and connect you with the right approach/people
    - Listen, advise and incorporate feedback into their processes and resources
    - Since you mentioned prototyping, own issues, faults, bugs. Provides fixes ASAP and adhere to SLAs.

    Strategic from your perspective may not be optimal from their perspective. Just like in a marriage, it takes adjustments for a relationship to evolve and become strategic!

    Sometimes I wonder if there can be a true partnership in a business situation! Whoever pays rules, dont they?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Issues with Server Virtualization

Virtualization has been considered a great way to maximize utilization of server resources by increasing server density. In addition, this concept is considered to be very key to green IT initiatvies as it reduces the number of compute resources needing to be supported in a data center thus reducing the cooling and power costs. Having said that, there seems to be a performance downside to virtualization. Given that a virtual machine (VM) is yet another layer of indirection the server HW this layer negatively impacts the performance any time there is a need for the application to access IO Channels, SAN disc and other network resources. This is especially so when the application code is either running inside of a JVM or an application server container such as a JEE container, .NET CLR or even a web server servlet container. In all cases, performance profiles of an application seem to vary whether the application is running inside of a virtual layer vs. directly on the physical server. V
Read more

Data Aggregation & Data Discovery - Part I

A lot of talk has been heard lately about the concept of data lake.  Variously known as, data refinery, data factory etc.  I find it interesting that we now hear logical architectural terms that speak to the concepts and to the purpose of the big data technologies such as Hadoop / HDFS and Apache distributed database technologies such as HBase / Cassandra .    This may be indicative of a shift.  What I am not sure of is does this mean that there is a level of maturity that has been achieved by this suite of open source technologies? Or could  this point to the fact that these technologies have practical applications that solve enterprise scale problems? Or does it show that enterprises have realized that they are no longer able to just deal with "structured data" and that a vast majority of information lies in the space of "unstructured content" leaving them no choice but to venture into the realm of big data technologies?  Not really sure!   The fact re
Read more