Technology integration: in the product, or in the press release

For three years I was the buyer, and every time a vendor told me their product worked with another one, I asked to see it in the product. Not the slide. The product. Most of the time it was not there yet.

This is the partnership type that gets announced the most and staffed the least. Two companies agree their products will work together. A press release goes out. A logo goes on a slide. And when a buyer asks whether it is actually in the product, the honest answer is often no, not yet, soon.

When I ran a certified technology program on the vendor side, certification meant something specific. It meant we had tested the partner's product against ours, we had a plan for what happened when either side shipped a breaking release, and somebody owned keeping it working. Not a badge. A maintenance commitment. Partners who wanted the badge without the work did not get it, and a few of them were loud about that.

The hardest version was certifying competing encoders on one platform. Our own encoder was on that platform. So were several others, from companies our sales team competed with every week. The sellers hated it, for about a quarter. They were being asked to sell a platform that made it easier for a customer to choose someone else's box.

Within a year the integrators had stopped asking which encoder. They cared that the platform worked with whatever the customer already owned, and that made the platform the thing they specified, and the platform was ours. The integration did not shrink our deals. It made the deals about a bigger thing.

That is the test for a technology integration, and it is not whether it is announced or even whether it is live. Did the integration change the size of a single deal? Name the deal. If you cannot, you have a compatibility statement, which is fine, but it is not a partnership.

Next Tuesday: distribution, the partner who knows your number better than you do.

Which integration on your partner page changed the size of a deal this year, and which are still waiting to exist?

Part 6 of 15 in the Which Partnership series.