Partners Partnering: The Next Horizon?

Several years ago, Cisco’s former channel boss Tom Mitchell outlined before a gathering of partners his vision for channel “ecosystems”: a concept that involved partners getting deep into their own specialties and then partnering with other channel organizations to handle other parts of the big-picture solution that the original reseller did not offer. While there has always been at least some of this going on in the indirect sales community, the vast majority of attendees listened politely and then went on to other things. Mitchell’s presentation was a bit before its time. Well, guess what. It’s back. Fast forward to September 12, 2007. Cisco’s current channel chief, Keith Goodwin, stood before a group of analysts in Dublin, Ireland to discuss a new portal and collaboration framework called “ISPN,” which effectively moves down that same ecosystem path. Things are different now. Times have changed. Cisco’s “specializations” have evolved into a fundamental underpinning of the overall channel program, based on the premise that IT is growing in too many directions at the same for most partners to evolve quickly enough. Technologies have become more complex and more tightly integrated. And most customers are less impressed by the latest whiz-bang gadget, and more focused on optimizing their actual bottom lines. My upcoming newsletter at www.prestiresearch.com (it’s not up yet) will cover the ISPN program in full detail. But the thing that really caught my attention in Dublin happened in a panel discussion with a handful of channel partners also attending the conference. I asked the partners if they were at all concerned about how they might actually execute on collaboration while protecting their businesses, and the answer was along the lines of, “Hey, no problem. We’ll all work together!” Another analyst tried the question a different way and got no further. Yes, the partner panel stayed completely on-message. Hmmm. I’m skeptical. On one hand, I think collaboration is an idea who’s time has come, and I think we’re all going to learn a lot more about how it will really work over the next few years. It’s a solid opportunity to expand capability while controlling investment costs. But on the other hand, I doubt it’s going to be that easy. Let’s say a teenage boy meets a teenage girl. He likes the girl but he also has male buddies. Does he want his buddies to date the girl? To borrow a phrase from the Irish: “Not bloody likely!” It’s all about account control, my friend. Okay, grown-up business-people tend to have a lot less acne and a few other differences compared to teenagers. But that desire for account control runs just as deep. Then there’s the idea of exposing differentiators to potential competitors –always a scary proposition. There are also legal implications associated with these collaborative efforts, plus enough potential contractual variations to make a lawyer salivate like Pavlov’s dog. How will they determine who will lead the engagement? How will the revenue be shared? Should there be a time frame during which one collaborator can’t pursue the customer independent of the other collaborator? How will pos-sales support be handled? Who will bear those costs? If something goes wrong with the integration, will the finger-pointing begin? Who’s liable for what, and when, and where, and how? If I wasn’t jetlagged and sitting on a plane headed west from Ireland, I could probably think of more issues to contend with. So what are the other questions? This is going to require a lot of dialogue. Best practices, or at least better practices, will emerge over time. But it will take a lot of discussion and a lot of focus. So let that dialogue begin. Until that happens, Cisco’s new collaboration rollout shows promise, but has certainly