Systems integrators: in the deck is not in the backlog

I spent twelve years inside one of the largest integrators in the world, so I have seen this partnership from the inside, and I will tell you the thing the partner managers on the outside usually get wrong.

A systems integrator does not sell your product. It decides whether your product is in the architecture. Those are different jobs, and the second one happens long before anyone from your company is in the room.

From the outside, a GSI partnership looks like a big win. A practice lead agrees to work with you, there is a kickoff, your logo goes into a reference architecture deck, and a partner manager reports that you are now aligned with a firm that has a hundred thousand billable people. All of that can be true and produce nothing.

Here is the version I lived through from the vendor side. A partner sold a federal deployment of our platform without asking us a single qualifying question. They promised the agency things that were chargeable extras and priced them as included. Then the data residency requirement surfaced: the work had to be done by people physically in the United States, and our engineers were overseas. None of that was in the deck. The deck was excellent. What was missing was one phone call before the contract, and every piece of the cleanup landed on us, because the partner threw the whole thing over the wall the day it signed.

That is the loud failure. The quiet one is the one in the title, and it is always the same shape. The person who championed you leaves, or gets promoted into something else, and the deck outlives the relationship. You are still in it. Nobody is selling from it. And because the GSI's billable people are paid on utilization, when a project gets tight the first thing cut is the part of the design they were not certified on, which is you.

So the test for a GSI partnership is not the announcement and it is not the deck. Which practice owns you, by name? Not the firm. The practice, and the person running it. Then the second question: how many of their billable people are certified on your product, because that number is the number of people who lose money if you get cut from a design.

If those two answers are "the firm" and "we are working on the certification," you are in the deck. You are not in the backlog.

Next Tuesday: services partners, and whether what you have is a template or a person.

Which practice at your biggest GSI owns you, and would they say so?

Part 8 of 15 in the Which Partnership series.