Partners

Alfresco Summit: One Down, One to Go…

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SpeakingBarc4I am flying back from my first Alfresco Summit (with my second next week in Boston), and I was impressed. Sure, I have to say something nice about my company’s annual conference, but I could have gone with any number of positive words.

Fun, educational, worthwhile, informative, entertaining….

While they are all true, I’m sticking with impressed. This isn’t my first conference in the industry by a long-shot, so if what happened in Barcelona impressed me, then something interesting had to happen.

I was impressed by the collection of smart people and by the almost universal level of excitement in the future of both Alfresco and the industry. I’ve seen this at a couple of conferences in this space, but it has been a long time since the excitement was this real.

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Selecting Software and an Implementation Partner

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When I was in the UK last week, I availed myself of the opportunity to catch-up with some friends in the industry. There were both product and delivery people in the crowd and we had a good time.

At some point, we hit the topic of Partners delivering software and how organizations should go about the process. We agreed on the right ways to use Partners and promptly celebrated with another round. As a rule of thumb, when that crowd agrees as a group, it is usually accepted knowledge. Even so, we all could readily recall multiple stories of people doing it poorly.

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Partners Still Critical for Software Vendors

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imageThis morning, over my morning coffee, I came across Lubor Ptacek’s thoughts on the End of the Partner Ecosystem. I started reading the article as a skeptic and I finished reading it confident in my disagreement. I quickly decided that I needed to take the time to refute Lubor’s points in a post rather than through Twitter.

Before I could find some time to write this post, Cheryl McKinnon tweeted that the Difference is that new [partner] ecosystem is developer/API driven, not sales driven. I think that observation, while accurate, only tells part of the story.

Before diving into that, let’s discuss what Lubor got right.

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