Is Darwin Wreaking Havoc with Your Partner Ecosystems?

By TC Doyle
Director of Intelligence

In nature, a healthy ecosystem provides a viable and sustainable environment for a rich diversity of living things, both flora and fauna. The same can be true in business, save, usually, for the leafy plants and humidity. Healthy business environments can sustain an abundance of different organizations and institutions, providing opportunity for a richer, healthier life for all.

If only things were that simple. Ecosystems can indeed provide an healthy environment for many. Many do so today. Think eBay.com, Craingslist.org and Myspace.com. These communities thrive by the strong desire of millions of Internet users, mostly consumers, to not only participate but also police and help administer these environments. The users of these sites not only purchase and sell goods and services, but they rate the value of their experiences, share insights and call-out harmful or unwelcome behavior. They are truly remarkable environments and are largely behind a new wave of euphoria behind many of the new "Internet 2.0" business models you no doubt have been hearing about. Piles of money are being heaped upon entrepreneurs in the social networking space or content sharing space. Picaboo.com and TravelPost.com are but two examples.

Building communities of peers in the business-to-business space, especially in IT, however, is proving harder. That’s despite the efforts of scores of vendors to establish ecosystems in which peer organizations can flourish by coordinating activities with one another to create businesses that deliver comprehensive solutions to customers in conjunction with complimentary partners in a mutually, beneficial fashion. That’s not to say that the efforts aren’t without merits. On the contrary, having a robust ecosystems of partners is a competitive advantage. Among other things, it can lead to:

• Increased sales coverage
• Tighter alignment with customers in vertical markets
• Improved customer satisfaction
• Enhanced customer satisfaction
• Better partner differentiation

UP CLOSE WITH SYMANTEC'S JULIE PARRISH

The office décor in Julie Parrish’s office at Symantec is pure Herman Miller , from the Charles and Ray Eames sofa to the Isamu Noguchi table .

To Julie, it’s just furniture, not a symbol of power, accomplishment or wealth. Considering the amount of time she spends there, it’s probably fitting. Since taking over the top channels job at Symantec some six months ago, she has been on the go almost non-stop. In addition to the traveling both here in the U.S. and abroad, she has overseen the roll-out of the company’s long awaited channel program. This one effectively combines Symantec’s long-standing partner program with the one it inherited from the Veritas acquisition.

"In less than one year after the biggest merger in the software industry, we got it done," she says proudly.

But what exactly did she get done?

Recently, Amazon Consulting's director of intelligence T.C. Doyle visited Julie in her Cupertino, Calif., office to discuss the new, global program she and her team rolled. Among other things, she says Symantec has made strides migrating from a volume-based program to a value-based one that has specific specializations to help partners differentiate their businesses. That’s the upside. The downside? Well, the company still has some systems work to complete to better support its 60,000 allies. And it’s partner structure, in her words, is "still a big, upside-down triangle."

Not that there’s anything wrong with an inverted pyramid approach to partner classification. The majority of IT companies rely on it still. Still, you get the sense that Parrish would have liked to be a bit more ambitions, but not at the expense of simplicity and practicality.

"We were very concerned about doing too much, too soon," she said to me Thursday as the rain outside her window fell in near record amounts.

Ultimately, Parrish wants to adopt a robust points-based partner program in which partners can gravitate to the areas in which they are strongest and get credit for all that they do for Symantec. Te company is not there yet, but is moving in that direction.

(Full disclosure: Amazon Consulting played a big part in helping Symantec and Veritas bring their programs together, though not everything my colleagues advised was ultimately embraced. Amazon Consulting, for example, proposed that Symantec embrace a structure that was ultimately more complex than what it went with.)

Companies thinking about adopting specializations might want to read up on what Cisco, Microsoft and Symantec have learned about building programs around them. Many ideas make sense on paper. But only some deserve the treatment they get. Parish, for example, thinks companies that try to build compliance specializations are getting too granular. Aside from a few partners, she believes the overwhelming majority of IT consultants cannot sustain a distinct, "compliance practice." "They may offer compliance services and expertise, but not as separate business units," she says.

Watch for Symantec to roll out more enhancements and thus get more granular as the year unfolds. But look closely at what the company has done, and, equally, what it has chosen not to do. It could have unveiled the functional equivalent of BMW’s oft-maligned iDrive vehicle control solution. Instead, it went with a straight-forward approach. Surrounded by furniture that subtlety reminds all around it that form follows function, it’s no surprise.