Alliance Aces

Mike Nevin understands the principles of success in alliances better than probably anyone. Back in the late 90s, he and a few colleagues went all-in on alliances. They predicted that considering the continued waves of technological innovation, alliances were the future. Like we said … he went all-in on alliances: He became Founding President of the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals (ASAP) in Europe. He’s also the CEO & Founder of his own alliance consulting firm, and he’s the Managing Director of Alliance Best Practice, where he continually analyzes the best practices of the world's strongest alliances, and develops models we can all follow. We interviewed him live on Facebook for Alliance Aces, and you can catch the entire interview right here.

Your success isn’t only predicated on your ability to sell or commercialize your offerings. Your success is dependent on the success of your alliance, especially in any industry with tech at its core (read: every industry). We caught up with Marc Geall at SAP InnovationX in London. He's SVP of Global Platform & Technology Ecosystems at SAP. He came on the Alliance Aces podcast and told us this: There’s no success without partner success. You can catch the entire video interview here, or listen in for one stellar podcast.

Every alliance professional has had some form of this happen: Your boss asks for influenced revenue within a specific alliance or joint solution. The truth is: You don’t have an answer. The information is simply unavailable, because it’s buried in outdated spreadsheets, and hidden across you and your alliance’s businesses. Sound familiar? It’s not just you — every alliance professional has faced that situation. Matt Gale and Jason Boggs came on the Alliance Aces Podcast to share this and 2 other issues every alliance professional faces … and how they solved them. Matt Gale is the Director for Go to Market & Strategic Alliances, and Jason Boggs is the Senior Director for Cloud Ecosystem & Enablement. Both of them work at NTT DATA Services.

Validating and deploying a joint solution can often start to drag far past intended deadlines. The usual technical, marketing, and bureaucratic issues any deployment faces increase exponentially within alliances. But that doesn't have to be the case, says Joan Morales, Director of Partner & Technology Alliances at Nutanix. Consistently, his team has managed to validate joint solutions in a matter of weeks. How? He has an incredible methodology. On our Alliance Aces Podcast, Joan gave us his 4 keys to establishing a rapid joint-solution deployment model within every alliance.

Alliance management can be a somewhat lonely field. On one hand, you’re surrounded: You’re managing personnel from not only your own team, but you’re also working with team members from the other companies within the ecosystem. On the other hand, very few people understand your role — as an alliance manager, you’re in a high-level, critical thinking, strategic position between entities. It’s as if you were running your own mini-business between all the alliances. Chances are, you love the challenge, but it can be awkward at times. Norma Watenpaugh understands. She is the Founding Principal at PhoenixCG, which specializes in best practices for alliances and alliance managers. She came on the Alliance Aces podcast to discuss trends she’s seeing (and sometimes creating) in the alliances profession. (You can catch the full interview on our podcast. It was also streamed on Facebook Live at this link.)

Sometimes it’s good to sit down with a true pro, and ask the tough questions. On this episode of the Alliance Aces podcast, we sat down with Stuart Kalman, the Director of Global Alliances for Hitachi Vantara at Veritas. He has a long list of alliance experience credentials, including HP, as the director of their Microsoft enterprise alliances, and at Thomson Reuters as VP of Strategic Alliances. On this episode, he gave 3 questions every alliance professional must ask themselves before going to market with a joint product or solution.

Back at FKOM in Las Vegas we had the chance to talk with RJ Bibby, Global SAP - System Integrator Digital Transformation Officer with NetApp. In this role, RJ must create fluidity among hyperscalers, SI partners, SAP, and Net App, with consideration of the customer experience. On our latest episode of the Alliance Aces podcast, RJ talked with us about the challenges he faces as an alliance professional, and the steps he’s taking to overcome them. Here’s what he had to say.

If you want to unleash the full potential of your partner network, building alliances is the name of the game. There are few people who know more about alliance building than Amit Tiwari, Vice President of Strategic Alliances & Systems Engineering at Affirmed Networks. Affirmed Networks is the leader in virtualized mobile networks, which brings together mobile operators, service providers app makers and more. Today alliances are driving technological like never before. "I've spent my entire career in service provider connectivity and mobility roles," says Tiwari. "This is a once in a lifetime kind of a transition, where you have virtualization, cloudification, and 5G-driven ubiquitous connectivity." If you listen to this podcast you’ll learn about: New exciting alliance landscape. Use cases will drive alliances. Making the ecosystem profitable for everyone. Upcoming joint go-to-market alliances. The future belongs to alliance makers.

An Ecosystem can have a variety of alliances: tech partnerships, strategic partnerships, ISVs, MSBs, SIs …. the list goes on. Determining how to leverage each of these partnerships for maximum ROI requires a complex set of skills in resource management. On this episode of Alliance Aces we invite Tony Beller to explain how he manages his complex ecosystem at Anaplan, a SaaS company with over 175 partners internationally. Tony is currently the VP of World WIde Strategy, Alliances, and Tech Partnerships. In total, he has over 12 years experience leading alliances at Slack (Head of WW Alliances), Service Now, Salesforce, and others. Here are his 4 keys on forming and managing complex ecosystems.

Imagine you're sitting down with a potential alliance in Tokyo. This is a time when someone like Rana Kahl shines. Rana is multilingual and multicultural. She's lived abroad in Europe and in the Middle East. Just to give you a glimpse of what her life has been like, Rana went to five different high schools and lived in seven different countries. These experiences give Rana a very unique perspective that she leverages when building alliances. Currently the Director of Global Alliances at Appirio, Rana came on the Alliance Aces podcast to talk about turning relationships into revenue. She shared some key takeaways she’s gained by being immersed in new and challenging experiences throughout her career. Here's what she had to say.

Not every company includes alliances in their strategy. But strategies change. As companies grow, their methods of deployment, sales, marketing, or even their product or service, can evolve, pivot, or change altogether. Take sales. If your sales begin to outpace your deployment capabilities, new partnerships become a necessity. Yes, that’s a good problem to have. But it’s still a problem. And it’s exactly the problem Andreas Berthold-van der Molen was hired to solve. He’s the Director of Partner Alliances For Germany, Switzerland, and Austria at Infor, the third largest business solutions provider in the world in over 70 industries. Checkout his strategy of combining sales and partnerships to tackle ambitious growth.

The importance of alliances cannot be overemphasized in today’s fast-moving technology space. The good news is, if you are open to forming new partnerships, they can be found in almost any avenue of your business. This week we explore 3 fundamentals of a healthy ecosystem: Key Strategic Alliances, Micro-Partnerships, & nonprofits. Someone who’s an expert in all 3 is hard to find. But we found him. His name is Chris Peacock, and he joined us on Facebook Live for an interview with the Alliance Aces podcast. Chris is the CMO of Traction on Demand, Canada’s largest dedicated Salesforce implementation partner. Currently, they have over 3,000 live projects, and clients include big-name logos such as Patagonia, Time Warner Cable, and Wildlife Conservation Society. Chris speaks French, spent 7 years as a “Big” to Big Brothers, and, we just had to mention this: Chris is also a helicopter pilot. (For the Facebook Live Video with Chris, click this link.)

Every business has expectations…expectations for their clients, their revenues, and their alliances. But things rarely go as planned. Joel Maloff is Senior VP of Strategic Alliances and Chief Compliance Officer at Phone.com. He came on the Alliance Aces podcast to share about how expectations shifted for him: Some of his most valuable alliances came from the least expected verticals. He shared how he’s navigated the world of what he calls “bluebirds and blackbirds,” and turned the unexpected into incredible growth opportunities.

Alliances aren’t about providing your best solution. They’re about providing (and marketing) a solution that is greater than than the sum of what each alliance can provide — a packaged solution that solves a wholistic problem that is giving ample pain to your end-user. On this episode, we interview Peter Yost, Director of Partnerships at FourKites, a supply chain real-time tracking solution. Peter gives us a taste of what they do at FourKites, and explains how their solution is a small part of what the end-user is truly purchasing. FourKites tracking abilities are great, but when partnered with the tech of powerful alliances, the end solutions become game-changers in the supply chain industry.

If you grow up in Southern California, the chances are high you spent a lot of time at the beach. That’s definitely true for Dustin Avol, our most recent podcast guest. Dustin Avol is a professional beach volleyball player turned alliance expert. During the first part of his career, Dustin invested in pro volleyball. After playing professionally, he turned to broadcasting and commentating. He then moved into sales, and finally landed in business development. Currently, he’s the Director of Strategic Alliances at Smartsheet, a cloud-based work execution platform. He came on the show to give us an inside look at some principles he’s learned through his experience with strategic alliances.

Despite the automation of today’s tech-heavy workforce, many mundane, repeated processes are still performed by humans. Robotics process automation may just be the solution to reducing tedious tasks. Meet UiPath: an RPA company that began in Romania. They’re changing the game in the enterprise world. We brought in Chris Morgan, Global VP of Partners & Alliances at UiPath for the Alliance Aces Podcast to share lessons on what he’s learned about alliances. Over the last 3 months, UiPath has experienced explosive growth, hiring 15 people a day for the last 3 months, finalizing a Series-c funding, and has now partnered with every notable enterprise logo, including Google, to create some of the world’s most advanced robotics.

If you are not working in close proximity with your partner, you can start to drift apart. But making an effort to constantly share information in an open environment is easier said than done. Pieter Van Heck is the Global Strategic Partner Manager for SAP at Dynatrace, which is a close partner of SAP.  Part of Pieter’s job is ensuring that Dynatrace and SAP have an open relationship and they are able to share information regularly with each other. This is for the good of each other as partners as well as for their joint customers. Dynatrace provides solutions around monitoring and they help bring their customer’s apps to SAP’s cloud platform.  Their technology is driven by artificial intelligence, and it helps clients find issues to troubleshoot during the migration process.  Dynatrace has been able to monitor over 21,000 applications in a year’s time. Dynatrace has been working with SAP for many years.  Originally, SAP was looking for a solution that could help them scale large environments, and they made

We often hear phrases like, “the customer is always right.” But do our actions prove that we believe that is true? Thomas Iseler is EVP/Managing Director Americas for DataVard Inc, an SAP Partner, and he is a huge advocate for listening to what your customer really wants. As Thomas likes to say, DataVard is one of the many (many) smaller SAP partners.  They have traditionally been well established in Europe (primarily Germany), but they are now moving to other areas of the globe as well.  They opened operations in the United States and Canada a few years ago and have seen a tremendous amount of growth in a short period of time.   DataVard, as their name implies, is all about SAP data.  They don’t get too involved with the transactional side of data, but instead they are mostly involved in moving, archiving, and handling data.  Some of their most prominent examples of projects include mergers and acquisitions that are under the SAP system, or assisting companies who are making the move to HANA.   Their role ha

The desired outcome of any alliance is for companies to come together and make each other better together. Co-innovation is one of the ways to make this magic happen. Sven Denecken is the SVP and Head of Product Management & Co-Innovation S/4HANA at SAP SE, and he is an expert in all things co-innovation.  His job is all about balancing the needs of customers and partners to keep both happy and he’s accomplished much of this through co-innovating with SAP. As a product manager, he needs to stay focused and automate many different functions that his team used to be involved with every single day.  Co-innovating around these projects with his partner helps his team stay limber, build for the future, and most importantly, satisfy the needs of their joint customers. Sven lives at the intersection of people, purpose, and technology. He loves to take tech and help create different beneficial outcomes for his clients.  This is what makes his job as a product manager so exciting: It’s not just about products, it’

As a fast-growing customer data infrastructure company, Segment has relied on partnerships throughout its evolution as a company. Paul McCord, Segment's senior manager of EMEA partner alliances, talks with Chip Rodgers on the Alliance Ace podcast about customer data infrastructure and treading the line between partnership and your own company's needs.