Strategic Alliance Magazine Q1 2020 - 24

ALLIES IN THE CLOUD

Build It as You Fly It, Pay and Learn
as You Go
New functionality is coming at customers faster than they
can digest it, forcing alliance managers on both sides to perpetually build the plane as they fly it, all while serving as
flight attendants for their first-class passengers. Customers,
ISVs, and GSIs have come to understand that it's better to
put new features in front of clients quickly and adjust them
on the fly as end users get a feel for how they best fit into
their business processes.
"Whereas in days past technology products were fully built
off of a core design, vendors now build their products iteratively, exposing their functionality at many value points
along the development pathway and effecting refinements
and scope changes rapidly-in days, not months-as feedback on the product functionality begins to emerge from
the market," explained Lisle Holgate, CSAP, senior director
of strategic alliances at Avanade, a joint venture of Microsoft
and Accenture. Software vendors have made their development platforms available to partners, including GSIs. "This
feedback loop increasingly includes partners such as global
systems integrators whose 'centers of excellence' are tasked
with keeping up with the technology as their field teams struggle to align client requirements with available technologies."
This agile development methodology is driving an evolution
of the relationship between GSIs and technology vendors.
Increasingly, technology vendors have asked their partners
to "source" or generate new leads and bring them into the
joint pipeline with the vendor. This is a stark difference from
the dot-com-boom days of the late 1990s, when "GSIs waited
for the referrals from the vendors. Now, technology vendors
value GSIs that create new business opportunities for them
and target programs to help GSIs
do just that. It's much more
of a joint-pipeline-pursuit
approach," according
to Holgate.

Accelerating the Art of the Possible
As part of this new paradigm, integrators like Avanade leverage centers of excellence to connect to technology vendors'
product stakeholders and extend their field teams. Today,
Avanade has a specific program to create solutions using the
vendor's technology to showcase the "art of the possible" for
clients trying to understand how to keep up with customer
demands. These solutions are effective ways to both reveal
the value of new functionality to clients as well as help them
refine their requirements and priorities-Holgate called these
previews "sales accelerators."
"Avanade is effectively using these accelerators to engage
with clients and prospects and create conversations that
both refine client requirements but also allow them to create
new services offerings. Further, as the use of the accelerators
widens and matures, Avanade is able to incorporate the continuous customer feedback into its sales accelerators, allowing for 'deployment accelerators' to emerge."
The market is benefiting from this changing relationship.
"The people responsible inside of a business today are able to
more rapidly refine and focus their requirements as they learn
more about the technologies and the innovations in solutions
revealed by the GSI through these accelerators. This relationship is both accelerating the discovery process and helping to set
intermediate value points in the life cycle of a solution, allowing a
better time to market and a longer shelf life of the solution. This,
in turn, helps to slow the replatforming urge as GSIs help clients
extend the value of the technology," said Holgate.

New functionality is coming
at customers faster than
they can digest it, forcing alliance
managers on both sides to
perpetually build the plane
as they fly it, all while serving
as flight attendants for their
first-class passengers.
All this is driving another evolution in the ISV-GSI relationship, as accelerators are revealing new vendor requirements
at a faster rate than ever. This has caused GSIs to work backwards, in a sense-determine the client's requirements first
and then align technology according to those needs. It used
to be the other way around.

24

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Strategic Alliance Magazine Q1 2020

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