Blogs

I have to start this one with a disclosure. I have never run a marketplace partnership as a vendor. I have built resellers, distributors, OEMs, alliances, and I have sat in standards bodies, but I have never had my product listed in a cloud provider's storefront and tried to make that the way it...

Early in my career I sold a hardware board that accelerated a specific video codec. We had one competitor that mattered. Small company, sharp founders, and they were building the same board we were, on the same API, so they could put it inside their own encoding appliances.

There is one partnership type where the people across the table are the companies you are trying to beat, and the outcome is a document that makes it easier for a customer to switch away from you. It is also the one that grows the whole market, and it is the one almost nobody in a partnerships...

Two executive sponsors meet at a conference and agree this makes sense. Two partner teams are assigned. A joint business plan is written with a number in it that neither side's field carries in quota. The kickoff is well attended. Then nobody opens the plan again, because the field teams on both...

OEM is the partnership where you disappear. Your part goes inside their product. Their name is on the box. The customer may never know you exist, and if the deal is structured right you are fine with that, because every unit they ship is your revenue and you did not have to sell a single one.

A few weeks ago I told you about a production company that sent us the occasional name, and how the referral was not the value, it was how I found the value. Here is the second half.

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.

One distributor was half the company's revenue. I built that from a standing start, no distributor, then one, then that one was half the number, and it was one of the best decisions that company made while I was there, because it let a small engineering-heavy company sell into places it could...

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.

A small minor league club on the East Coast, one of the first to bet on new technology instead of waiting to see who else tried it, wanted its fans to have something they could not get anywhere else in the ballpark.

I have never made a buying decision because of a referral fee. Not once, on either side of the table. As a buyer I did not know the fee existed and would not have cared. As a seller the referral partners I inherited produced a name or two a quarter, usually someone who was already talking to us.

Every partnership I have built that lasted started with a piece of paper I wrote myself, not one marketing handed me. Four questions, in order.

Tuesday I listed eleven kinds of partnership. Before I take them one at a time, two things that apply to all of them.

I have asked that question in a lot of rooms over 25 years and the answer is usually "a partnership." That is not an answer. It is a category. Inside it there are at least eleven different animals, and they eat different food.

Flat UC spend, a climbing tool count, and a $10 per person gap that compounds to $15M over ten years. What unowned communications spend actually costs.

Half of enterprises run a fragmented UC environment and pay a fragmentation tax for it. Twenty five years of watching nobody own communications.

A broken communications platform is rarely broken. It is usually built for the wrong audience. What a fleet of drivers taught me about internal comms.

Before tech sales, I was a broadcast engineer, and part of that job was climbing towers. Not just any towers. Our main transmitting tower, and the big microwave tower everyone else in the city aimed their dishes at. The danger was simple: falling. You strapped in every time, no exceptions. And before you touched a rung, you looked the structure over for rust and for bolts that weren't sitting right, because a compromised connection hundreds of feet up isn't a repair problem a

Midnight in London. An hour before our upload window. My CTO just fried all seven of my encoders. I was the video encoding engineer at Seminar Source in the early streaming days. They hired me because I designed and built the field encoders and video flypacks myself. We were running a live event for the American Bar Association. We'd already beaten one power problem just to keep the live show up. Now we had to push the recordings to Equinix so people back in the States could

Today you walk into almost any venue, find the fiber jack, and you're live in ten minutes. Let me tell you what going live used to cost. Back in the early streaming days, the video was the size of a postage stamp and the internet was dial-up. DSL wasn't even mainstream yet. So if you wanted to push live video out of a building, the connection itself was the job. Not the cameras. Not the encoder. The pipe. We'd order ADSL and bond multiple lines together just to scrape togethe