In February 2018 IDC forecast that Partner-to-Partner (P2P) will ‘finally come of age’ by 2020. They forecast that in 2020 30% of revenue generated from cloud partners would be from P2P initiatives. And that the growth of partners involved in P2P engagements would drastically outpace that of ‘conventional customer-facing’ partners.
Have these predictions come true? Is P2P as significant as IDC predicted, and if so, where is it happening? P2P is not top of the agenda for many companies. Should it be?
WHAT IS P2P AND WHERE HAS IT COME FROM?
‘Partner to Partner’ simply means that one channel partner collaborates with another to offer an end to end customer solution. For example, one partner may offer a share trading application that requires high-speed networking to manage big data in real time. Another partner may specialise in low-latency high-uptime networking infrastructure. They work together to deliver a customer solution in the Finance market.
The growth of P2P is due to a number of significant changes that have taken place in technology routes to market. Software, particularly cloud software, has become much more open, allowing channel partners to develop their own solutions. Channel partners that used to be focused on reselling, now offer applications and services, often to address the needs of particular vertical industries, like the Finance market in the example above.
In parallel to this, customers themselves have changed. Where previously the IT Department owned technology investment decisions, this is now driven by ‘line of business’ owners. The Sales VP might decide which CRM tool the company will select. The IT Department is an enabling function, that will support the deployment and deliver a networking environment in which it can operate.
The separation of vertical specialism (sold to line of business leaders) and infrastructure (sold to heads of IT) is what creates the need for P2P.
THE CISCO P2P PARTNER ECOSYSTEM
Cisco has pioneered the development of partner ecosystems to encourage P2P. Cisco realised early on that the natural P2P ‘motion’ is for larger value-added resellers (VAR’s) to link up with independent software and services specialists (ISV’s) who have deep vertical industry expertise. VAR’s are often technology generalists focused on IT infrastructure, and have built longstanding customer relationships with IT decision makers. ISV’s bring vertical market solutions, so they can engage line of business owners more effectively, but they often lack scale.
To encourage P2P and to unlock the customer opportunity that end to end vertical solutions can offer, Cisco did three things:
• They created a Marketplace for ISV’s to promote their applications and their vertical expertise to other partners.
• They ran face to face ‘Ecosystem Exchange’ events in major cities, like matchmaking for partners.
• They supported ISV’s to optimise their solutions to run on Cisco infrastructure.
HOW TO LOOK FOR P2P
The Cisco example above tells us why application Marketplaces and Partner Locators are important today, more than ever. Any why modern Partner Locators need to prioritise partners based on customer need, not based on partner location. See the Kovendi blog here
for more on this topic.
It’s easy to think that the audience for Marketplaces and Partner Locators is only end customers. But in fact other partners need these resources just as much as end customers. And these resources have to be designed and delivered with that need in mind. They are P2P tools.
At Kovendi we are sometimes asked “Is P2P important, we don’t hear much about it?” We answer by asking two more questions. How many vendors offer Application Marketplaces? A lot. And who is a key audience for these Marketplaces? P2P is in fact all around us. We sometimes just don’t know how to look for it.
THE ROAD TO P2P
If you’re a technology vendor with a growing ecosystem of application specialists offering vertical solutions, what simple steps can you take towards P2P?
• Re-develop your Locator so that it allows partners to feature vertical specialisms, and so that it searches based on customer need, not so much on partner location.
• Introduce vertical industry specialisms to your channel sales team, so that individuals own verticals, and get to know partners with relevant solutions.
• Encourage larger VAR-type partners to build relationships with vertical application and services specialists. Think about matchmaking.
Kovendi works with clients to take them on the P2P journey. Contact us
for more insight, and to learn how we can help make your P2P journey a success.