Amazon Consulting Buys Into Channel Alliances

Amazon Consulting, which specialises in matching up IT companies and alleviating frictions to build strategic partnerships, has announced that it acquired Partner Alliances, a strategic alliance development company. Terms of the deal were not made available.

Amazon Consulting will now be able to expand its focus on alliances service and strategy development while heg to monetise these strategic corporate alliances with new go-to-market planning and execution tools.

Holistic View Of The Channel

“Now we’ll be able to take those partnerships that work well into the channel,” Amazon Consulting CEO Diane Krakora told eWEEK.

“We’ve always had a very holistic view of channel and alliance management programmes and strategies, and this acquisition expands our capabilities with a dedicated focus that allows us to better help our clients put their alliances to work through their existing channels.”

Partner Alliances does its job for clients by using its own tools and programmes for strategic development, competitive benchmarking, communications, partner enablement, and legal and governance, Krakora said. Its secret sauce is its Alliance Life Cycle Tracker, a proprietary tool that tracks and monitors all aspects of a client’s alliance relationship while enabling them to map out the next steps of engagement.

This tool will be incorporated into Amazon Consulting’s PartnerPath programme automation system, Krakora said.

According to the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), IT companies face heavy pressure to leverage corporate alliances to achieve greater results, as opposed to doing everything themselves. It reported that 92 percent of US IT companies say that alliances are important to present and future growth and that 77 percent claim they are already involved with strategic alliances. Consequently, these firms demonstrate 43 percent greater revenue than their non-aligned counterparts, the SIIA said.

While companies remain interested in partnerships and their potential to increase revenue and establish a competitive advantage, most alliances fail to meet expectations. Many of them miss the opportunity to maximise adoption of the alliance outcome or product, said Tim Curley, managing partner of Partner Alliances.

“We have been very successful in this space by providing the services, resources and tools for building and managing strategic alliances,” Curley said. “The union between Amazon Consulting and Partner Alliances gives technology vendors access to a complete suite of services and expertise spanning both channels and alliances.”