Platforms

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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You Can’t Sell a Platform to Users

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imageBeen working on building a new, solid, backbone for AIIM’s information since I joined as CIO. We finally reached the stage for detailed demos last week. While extremely time consuming, it was also extremely educational.

One of the things I hadn’t expected to be so obvious is the right and wrong way to demonstrate a solution built upon a platform. In fact, the dichotomy was so severe that almost every person not giving the demo commented upon it.

I thought I would share the two approaches that we witnessed and then relate it back to the Content Management industry of the last 10+ years. Before I get into that, I’ll provide some context in the form of the project background.

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