Top 5 Things to Know About Alliances!

Happy New Year to my fellow alliance professionals! After a hiatus and the holiday break, I'm back in the blogger's chair.. 


As we are all in the midst of our 2012 joint business planning efforts with our partners, it's a good time for a few reminders to our alliance stakeholders about what's involved in establishing and developing partnerships. 

To that end, I bring you - The Top 5 Things Stakeholders Should Know About Alliances.

1.       Alliance Relationships Require Care and Feeding

Alliance relationships are much like personal relationships, they require care and feeding to establish and grow. Alliance relationships are made up of a series of personal relationships between executives and stakeholders at both companies. Managing these relationships, developing the shared vision and constructing and executing the joint business plan, is the raison d’etre of the Alliance Manager. All alliances are established based on a promise of mutual value. The role of the Alliance Manager is “value creation” – orchestrating resources, aligning strategic goals, managing conflict to ensure that your company (and the partner) deliver increased value to our customers.

2.       It takes a village

In today’s increasingly complex and interdependent world, it often “takes a village” to deliver a complete solution to the customer. For example, your company may have world class technologies and solutions in multiple industries and horizontal domains. Your partners may bring strong business consulting and domain expertise, scalable delivery capability, complementary technologies and solutions and in many cases, supplementary understanding of your customers’ business issues and environments.

Together with your partner ecosystem, your company is able to extend its capabilities to maximize value to the customer.

3.       Customer demand often drives partnerships

Your customers might express a need for a third party provider’s unique and niche capabilities and may request integration of the third party’s software with yours. Or your Partner’s customer may be making the same request of your partner. Or your company may identify a need to collaborate with a third party to address market demand driven by customer requirements in a certain industry or domain. These are the three major drivers of partnerships.

4.       Alliances help drive innovation!

At SAS, we are collaborating with partners in many of our key technology innovations (e.g. high performance computing) and partners also provide benchmarking/tuning/optimization and new technology adoption support.

In addition to supporting your company's technology innovation, partners also help identify new opportunities, in which we collaborate to deliver joint initiatives. 

5.       Alliance Management is profession! 

Most of the alliance professionals in SAS Global Alliances and Channels division are certified alliance professionals, who have earned their certification through The Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals (ASAP). ASAP is the largest global professional organization dedicated to alliance formation and management. Additionally, SAS is a Global Sponsor of ASAP and we have been encouraging our key partners to become members as well. We leverage ASAP best practices in our work. This helps both our partner community and by extension, our customers, because as a result, we are able to more effectively develop partnerships to create and deliver innovative solutions for our customers.