What's a Partner?

Few large businesses can operate without partners of some kind. Automobile manufacturers partner with components suppliers before manufacturing a car, and with dealers after they manufacture it. Telephone companies may have cross-promotional relationships with handset manufacturers or retailers.

Many of these partnerships are merely transactional in nature: a manufacturer puts out bids for components or a telephone company spots a short-term opportunity and signs a contract with a potential marketer. In the software industry, however, longer-term partner relationships are common, primarily because no one vendor is usually in a position to provide all the products and services that customers want. A second reason is that software is usually highly configurable and flexible, which means that no two customers want to use it exactly the same way. That creates opportunities, even a necessity, for partners who understand their customers’ businesses to help sell the software and to deploy, configure, manage, and integrate it with other hardware and software.