When you need an IT consultant, what you really need is expertise. Given the complexity of modern business processes and the ever-growing array of possible tech solutions, no one consultancy can hold all of the deep expertise you need for optimal results in-house. That’s where partner ecosystems come into play.
The quality of a consultancy’s partner ecosystem has a huge impact on the consulting process—and can make or break the final outcome. In this article, Jocelyn Yu, Partnership Manager at Cloud Interactive, shares what she knows about creating and maintaining a high-value partner ecosystem.
What is a partner ecosystem?
The textbook definition of an ecosystem is “a community or group of living organisms that live in and interact with each other in a specific environment.”
So what’s a partner ecosystem? I’d define it as “a community of mutually beneficial partners that are interested in achieving similar goals.” I think this definition fits well and believe that building a partner ecosystem is critical to a company's distribution strategy.
I’ve seen from my past experiences that a rich partner program enables enterprises to employ various technologies to create better solutions and services for clients. The partner ecosystem also lets companies scale their business in a way they never could in isolation.
Why does Cloud Interactive focus on the partner ecosystem?
Partners can help optimize and streamline service delivery, act as selling allies, drive new business models, and spur joint innovation.
Most of today’s big successful companies have an extensive partner ecosystem in the background, driving them forward. For example, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon all boast wildly successful partner ecosystems.
But it’s not just large companies that benefit from robust partnerships. Service providers should also understand and leverage strategic partnerships. The research firm Gartner writes: “Leading service providers will leverage assets and expertise, requiring a dynamic ecosystem to extend their business models” (Top Priorities for Tech & Service Providers: Leadership Vision for 2021).
At Cloud Interactive, we value this service strategy. We’ve already started to leverage several partners to provide a full range of services to our clients. We’ll continue to reinforce this ecosystem and jointly pursue long-term relationships with our partners.
How strategic partnership benefits everyone: companies, partners, and clients
Companies can grease the wheel of growth by calling on skills, tools, and ideas from their associated strategic partner network.
During the pandemic, movement restrictions have limited business negotiations and services. While online communication tools can solve some of these problems, they’re still not as direct and effective as face-to-face problem-solving. This highlights the importance of partnerships.
Having partners in different regions helps companies communicate with local clients and better understand clients’ needs and application scenarios. Partnerships also enhance the partners’ ability to jointly develop new business models by growing their consulting and technical capabilities.
From the client’s point of view, it’s always better to have a trusted partner when facing business and technical challenges. Clients greatly benefit from a total services provider who can offer high-quality consulting, software development and implementation, infrastructure monitoring and maintenance, and systems integration—all in one place.
Such arrangements make it more likely that partners will hold the expertise that complements a company’s abilities. The partner ecosystem is an essential resource for filling in gaps and delighting clients with better service delivery and strategic custom solutions.
How Cloud Interactive helps with your partner ecosystem?
Hand-in-hand with our strategic partners, Cloud Interactive provides a full complement of end-to-end solutions and IT consulting services. Our professional consulting, UX/UI design, and software development services arrive from around the world.
We’ve partnered with UiPath to provide Robot Process Automation (RPA) services to help financial clients optimize their daily operations processes. In the Cloud Services area, we’ve partnered with AWS, Microsoft Azure and New Relic. Thanks to the efficient maintenance, hosting, monitoring, and other cloud tools our partners provide, we can ensure reliability and performance efficiency.
How about hardware? We know that after the development of custom software, clients need supported hardware where they can view their data, carry out job functions, and so on. So, we’ve partnered with Apple to create integrated hardware and software solutions for our clients.
Cloud Interactive is one of the leading IT consulting companies in the Asian and North American markets. As a professional IT consulting company, we understand the power of partners to reach new prospects, accelerate deals, and most importantly, increase customer success.
Our wide-ranging industry expertise, custom solutions, and proven reliability set us apart. We expect more partners and corporate clients to join our ecosystem in the future, allowing us to optimize our partner ecosystem and empower more clients and partners.
Contact us now to get to know our complete ecosystem resources and strategic customized solutions.
About Cloud Interactive
Cloud Interactive is an AI, Software Engineering, and Design consulting company founded in 2010.
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