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By Todd Benjamin and Alexandra Mehat
In a previous job, I came back from maternity leave to learn that our strategic billing partner had been acquired by our main competitor! It felt like a cold shower on a snowy day. Our wonderful and flagship end-to-end VoIP strategy seemed to fall into pieces overnight.
The episode brought up an interesting question: should we have acquired our partner before our competitor did? The answer isn’t straightforward and in this type of situation you must address the following considerations:
- What is your volume of business with the partner?
- Does the combined solution really bring measurable benefits to your existing and prospective customers?
- Would the culture and business values of both companies fit?
- Does a significant part of the partner’s business come from your competitors?
- How much business do you do with the partner’s competitors?
Be careful not to buy a partner just because you fear your competitor might buy him first. Make sure you can adequately answer the above questions.
Partnerships are mandatory in today’s highly demanding telecom world.
Networks are so complex today that a single company cannot offer everything, unless, of course, you are the next Nokia-Siemens or Alcatel-Lucent. Even then, you need to have specific partners to address niche markets and strategic partners to increase global visibility and geographic reach. Take the Alcatel – Microsoft Triple Play partnership for instance. It may not be the most successful partnership in terms of revenue, but it definitely brought visibility to both companies and anchored the fact that Alcatel was a significant Triple Play manufacturer in everyone’s mind.
Service Providers resist having a single provider for all their network elements. First, they need to foster competition between the vendors to get the best price. Second, they need to evaluate different vendors to get the best of each breed to offer the complex voice, video, e-commerce and multimedia services their customers are looking for today. The end result too often is an awkward marriage of unlikely players: each a leader in its respective area but together a potential disaster in the making.
So how should you glue the pieces together? You need a solid foundation that will last but still be flexible enough to allow building on top of it and expanding.
“Oh no, we missed our Christmas deadline! Boy! Easter is gone too… Darn, summer is too late, everyone’s on vacation!” Your customers don’t want to hear or experience that! They
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Be careful not to buy a partner just because you fear your competitor might buy him first. |
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also don’t want to see their competitors take market share first as it’s often a first come, first served – and first kept— industry! So if you want to get them to market before next Christmas and not wait for the next Labor Day sale, you need to get the components together fast. It’s even better when those components come already glued together and you can commission them in days or weeks rather than months. That’s what partnerships are for!
Successful vendor partnerships lead to successful customers.
Particularly in the OSS/BSS world, vendors must find a way to integrate with leading third party equipment providers. That’s our fate, but also our value! With fully integrated solutions, Service Providers can deploy a wide range of personalized services, from basic Internet to complex Multiple Play. Data, Voice, Video, Content, gaming, Messaging, music, and mobility are some of the many services end-users are demanding. These services should be available across any access technology (DSL, cable, satellite, wireless, cellular, or BPL), which adds another dimension, and brings even more vendors in the loop. These services should also be available across devices: computer, TV, PDA, mobile or smart phone, fixed phone, gaming gear, .etc. All of these media and devices need to be provisioned, managed and billed flawlessly.
Successful vendor partnerships lead to successful customers:
- Preexisting relationships between the vendors will save the customer time – and therefore money – in engineering, project management and coordination; resulting in project efficiency and immediate results
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