Alliance Aces

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.

Here’s an idea for creating tangible value for your alliance partners: Give them a platform in front of their peers and make them a superstar. Lisa Box is the Vice President of Strategic Alliance at WP Engine which is a digital experience platform for WordPress.  Lisa and her team look at the opportunities that are within that ecosystem make sure their partners (including developers, marketers, etc.) get all that they need from WP Engine. Lisa heads up a team that is dedicated to strategic alliances.  Their primary focus is on agency groups and strategic technology providers.  When Lisa first started in her new role, she saw that there was a common thread of users (from freelancers all the way to large conglomerates) of common development needs: more education, enablement, and tools.   These were all very similar needs even though the organizations needing them were quite different.  So Lisa started to ask the question: how do we look at these customers as our true partners? There are now 1,800 agencies in th

No two organizations are exactly the same… And it’s often what sets them apart rather than what they have in common that makes for a great partnership. Charles Whitten is an Alliance Manager at Citrix where he sees the main challenge of his role as aligning sales, marketing, and operations across multiple organizations.  Charles sees what a struggle that can all be and just how different some organizations are. Citrix’s offering is fully complementary to Microsoft’s and although they are different they really serve to strengthen each other in the market.  They build solutions on top of each other to go to market together and bring the best solutions to customers, and some of their differences help them do just that. In this episode of Alliance Aces, we spoke with Charles at Microsoft Inspire about joint solutions, facing your differences, and how to cover different business verticals and segments.

Are you just another service to your alliance partner?   Or do you provide real, tangible, strategic value in ways they can’t reproduce themselves?   Arnaldo Amaro is the LATAM-SPLA Territory Manager at Dynatrace where he is working to push companies towards managing their user experience on their platforms in better and more efficient ways.     Many times companies experience functionality and user experience issues on their platforms that they can no longer manage because modern environments have become so complex.  This is where Arnaldo and his team can come in and make a big difference.   Arnaldo joined us for this edition of The Alliance Aces Podcast to talk about how to track where partners are having issues on their platform, how to work effectively with partners, and unique region challenges in Latin America.

How many challenges at your job over the past week have been due to a lack of transparent communication? Akash Satapathy is an Alliance Manager at Tech Mahindra where he manages relationships with Micro Focus and HP.  It is essential that Akash communicates clearly and transparently with everyone on his own team as well as the partners he manages as well.  This has allowed him to deepen connections internally at Tech Mahindra and externally at Micro Focus and HP. In this episode of the Alliance Aces Podcast, we check in with Akash about communication and transparency, the similarities between being an Alliance Manager and a CEO, what his team is working on, and some of the challenges he has overcome in his role.

“How can we be better together? How can one plus one equal three?”   These are questions that Chris Mancebo, the Senior Manager of Global Strategic Alliances and Cloud Service Providers at Veritas Technologies, is constantly asking himself.   Chris joined us at Microsoft Inspire for this episode of Alliance Aces where we spoke about lessons learned, defining roles in partnerships, and the ever-important goal of alignment.

Involving your engineering team in your strategic partnership isn’t just important.   In many cases it is absolutely critical to success.   Gautam Bharti  has an amazing product background that allows him to see things from a perspective that many others in his position at other companies just aren’t able to see.   We spoke with GB at Microsoft Inspire about how he ended up at Trend Micro, his product background, and joint go to market strategies.

Would you say that you are part of a healthy ecosystem with your strategic partners?   Are you listening to your partners?  Anticipating their needs? Aligning your goals?   Bob Knepp is the Senior Global Alliance Manager - Video Collaboration at Logitech where he is one of two people internally focused on the relationship Microsoft.   We interviewed Bob at Microsoft Inspire for this episode of Alliance Aces to talk about challenges faced in alliances, best practices, and managing difficult relationships.

How do you craft your brand’s story in a way that sells a solution over a piece of hardware?   One way is to develop alliances with partners that truly make you “better together.”   Graham Williams often says that his team is offering solutions rather than just hardware, and this brings their value proposition to the next level.   We caught up with Graham to talk about the sales channel options, the details of combining forces with other companies, and how different partners come together for a joint go-to-market plan.