If you’ve ever wondered the value of partner programs from software/hardware companies, let me give you my perspective from the front lines. My clients should encourage me to come to this every year. (If you’re a Cogent client, I fully give you the right to hold me accountable to be at these things!)
After evaluating the first full day of the conference last night, after my ears stopped ringing from the GoGos concert, I believe that the format of the conference is fantastic. I tried to put myself in the seat of my clients, and I would hope that my service providers are doing things like this with strategic partners. I had such great meetings yesterday with other partners and with Microsoft folks. Here’s my assessment of the value from a depth and breadth perspective.
I had great meetings yesterday with folks from Corasworks and HunterStone. Just those two companies provided me so much information on how I can offer my clients a more complete solution to their business challenges. I think that the value of understanding the offerings of other partners would prevent me from trying to do something from scratch for a client, who would greatly benefit from me knowing how to access the knowledge or products to keep his/her costs down. This also helps me because it lowers my risk and allows me to stay in my core competency.
I’m also amazed at the solutions that are already out there. Just the CorasWorks guys for example: they’ve developed a great workflow layer over SharePoint that could go a long way to moving a business toward process automation. Admittedly this is something that we could build. It’s all built in .NET around SharePoint… that’s what we do anyway. The cool thing is that they’ve got a supported customer base that drives them and holds them accountable to keeping the product improvement going. That should be a great comfort to a client executive.
Meeting with and listening to the Microsoft guys is also very valuable to increasing this horizontal solution capability. Not only are these guys, like Rick Herrera and Dale Schalgel, pointing us to great partners who extend can our capabilities, the resources given out at these events are unparralelled. When I was at E&Y, we developed our own knowledge base to deliver from. We’re working to replicate that type of knowledge management environement at Cogent, but it’s a difficult and time consuming discipline. As a partner of Microsoft, Microsoft allows us to access a bunch of collateral to ensure that we have the best informaiton to deliver a quality solution. Lots of stories about how we’ve cut out lots of time in augmenting our proprietary assessment frameworks to developing requirements. My clients want me here.
On the depth side, unquestionably, the knowledge passed along in the sessions here is unparralelled. My experience so far has been that you really have unfettered access to the people who know these products here. Microsoft has so much invested in the partner network that they can’t afford not to throw their best people at this conference. Partners are the Microsoft sales channel. They depend on us to keep their messages fresh and the delivery quality high. Really some great stuff here. Partners only extend the depth of knowledge at this event. More to come on how we’re looking to Partners to help us go deep in some offerings.
So, a week off the frontlines of client service. It’s definitely worth the investment so far.All for now.
