Best Practices for Winning a Partner Ecosystem

In a tightly connected IT Ecosystem, Partners play a very pivotal role and deliver an unique service which  connects the end user and the technology provider. While Partner may be a generic word the IT world uses but Partners can be specifically referred to as System Integrators (SI) Managed Service Providers (MSP) , Independent Solution Vendors ( ISV) depending on the nature of service and expertise  they specialise in.

Partners are an extended arm of the technology service providers and help the end customers to customise and build the solutions to meet the specific business requirements of the end user. This statement emphasizes the critical role they play in lighting up the solution landscape in the Industry.

Having a very vibrant partner ecosystem and nurturing a great partnership is important to both the Technology Service Providers and also to the end customers. Few areas where Technology Service Providers should focus on winning the partner should be in enabling and skilling of partners on new products and services, providing them architectural support to design and deploy the solution, handholding them in performance and  fine-tuning activities and overall build the  partner strategy to  closely work with the technology service providers in a collaborative approach. While from the end customers perspective, they should engage the partners in their industry specific workshops, provide them deeper perspective into their functional requirements which would enable partners for a smooth and seamless solution implementations.

Having the Partner Ecosystem is a very important step in defining the success of any project and special efforts should be made to develop and nurture and vibrant partner ecosystem in the industry by all other stakeholders in the segment.