Why you should swipe right on your business partnerships
As humans we spend most of our adult lives working on building strong stable relationships with friends, work colleagues and their partners. As a society we are shown great romantic love stories about finding that perfect match — that one person who is the other half to our whole, the relationship that will complete us and change our world for the better. Partnering runs through every element of our society. Whatever you believe to be true about relationships, partnering is at the core of our human DNA and for millions of years it has contributed to the evolution of our entire species.
Yet from a business perspective, one of aspects of the Australian market that has surprised me the most, is the lack of a truly developed partner ecosystem. Sure there are partnerships in the traditional sense — we have a very mature distribution channel and wholesaling telecommunications services has been around for years. So IT Companies in Australia have for years have had mature established traditional partner communities delivering a wide range of value added services. But what the market has lacked has been partnering innovation. As example, cloud aggregators just basically exist today and the possibility of partnering with communities or niche partners to achieve scale is something rarely seen.
When the economy has been tough in other markets, partners have been forced to partner with each other in order to meet 100% of their customers’ requirements, save money and weather the storm. In this market, when it comes to expanding their services portfolio, Australian partners have maintained a “do it ourselves” mindset. Our strong local economy and smaller playing field has led Australian partners to maintain the strategy of making investments in their own technology stack and sweating the assets to achieve ROI before moving onto adding the next new service. Unfortunately the rest of the world had moved on from this model and we are lagging behind.
Even today, many partners that I meet, aren’t expanding their portfolios of cloud services and are choosing to remain focused on limited cloud offerings as a service due to a lack of internal capability to provide more. In a market where month on month hundreds of non-IT companies are jumping on the cloud bandwagon and entering the IT services market, this dynamic will continue to bring real challenges to our partner community in Australia.
How will these partners be able to compete moving forward, when the competition is offering much more than they are providing today.
“Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much” Helen Keller
Partnering isn’t just about choosing a technology vendor. Partnering needs to become much more . No service provider, big or small can deliver everything a customer wants or needs. Customers’ requirements are evolving and becoming more complex and their future choices around the partner that they will work with is already about which company can offer me everything I need.
Cloud aggregation is the number one area where partners can innovate without risking their business. Aggregation gives you the ability to be flexible and adaptable, to create new service offerings through a basic API Integration and ensure you always have the latest software and services available to meet your client’s needs.
Aggregation isn’t just about choosing one or two vendors to consume public cloud offerings that will compliment your core offerings. It is about choosing multiple vendors, partners, services companies, ISV, niche providers and bringing everything together in a store type offering that enables your customers to pick and choose the best of breed technologies and innovations to meet their growing business needs.
In Australia, we need to start consuming rather than building. Joining forces rather than creating the same services to compete against one another, because the market is only so big and working together instead of against one another is the only way we can ensure future success and maximise profitability for your business.
So the next time there is an opportunity for you to partner, swipe right on developing that business relationship….
Disclaimer: This is a personal blog post. Any views or represented in this blog are personal and belong solely to author and do not represent those of people, institutions, or organizations that the author may or may not be associated with in a professional or personal capacity, unless explicitly stated. Any views or opinions are not intended to malign any religion, ethic group, club, organisation, company or individual.
