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Home > Community > Business Blogs > Strategic Alliances > What's The Deal With Strategic Global Alliances at Sitecore?
650,000... ...that's how many partners Microsoft has in portfolio. Such a large number epitomizes how important partner networks can be to Independent Software Vendors of all sizes. Not all partners of ISVs play the same role: some distribute, host, implement, or train on software; while others develop on top of it to deliver specialized- and business-relevant solutions. Simplistically put, they make today's software work. But who's thinking about tomorrow's software?
ISVs' R&D departments, of course. But that's not all. Another entity plays a critical role in shaping tomorrow's world of IT, which Harvard Corporate Strategy Professor Michael Porter called "International Coalitions" in 1986, and that is now often referred to as "Global Strategic Alliances (GSA)"―the pooling of resources (intellectual property, expertise, networks, assets, equipment, personnel, effort, etc.) from different organizations whose combination is expected to generate greater impact than what would otherwise result from individual efforts.
In essence, GSAs can take greater risk and be therefore far more innovative than a company’s own R&D department, whose potential is inherently throttled. Oftentimes, breakthrough ideas get disregarded or even discarded due to many factors and concerns, including:
Five centuries ago, renaissance philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli captured it all for us : "Nothing is more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than achieving a new order of things".
While GSAs do not cure all the above, they do heal many thanks to their inherent "sharing" and incubation nature. Resource sharing minimizes risk and cost, and increases the potential for high return and impact resulting from synergies. That value proposition is so compelling that the number of corporate alliances has been increasing annually by some 25% and that these alliances account for nearly a third of many companies’ revenue and value, according to Harvard Business School Professors and Alliance Experts, Jonathan Hughes and Jeff Weiss.
Greater competitiveness and growth are “what is in it” for them. Concretely, it’s by delivering bleeding-edge, business-relevant, and ergonomic solutions that GSAs help adopting organizations develop sustainable competitive advantages and new growth engines. Skeptic? Keep reading. Let's take the example of our Cloud Alliance with Microsoft. A few years ago when we were thinking about our Cloud strategy, we did not know whether it was light, or an oncoming train, at the end of the tunnel. But we jumped all in. And it paid off. That said, we should not take all the credit for it, as we could not have done it without our ally, Microsoft. Over the past few years, we have been part of the select Windows Azure and SQL Azure Technical Adoption Programs. And more recently, we have been invited to join the Azure Customer Advisory Board. The former helps Microsoft shape the Azure platform services and helps ISVs like Sitecore deliver even more business-relevant and impactful solutions. While the latter helps Microsoft clarify Mission, Vision, and Roadmap for Azure. But the immersive collaboration with Microsoft does not stop there. Beyond these programs, we have been working with the Azure business leaders across the board: from engineering, to business management, to senior executives, to technical support, and anything in between. Everything and everyone has worked together to make Azure solutions a reality.
While Jonathan Hughes and Jeff Weiss said in their "Simple Rules for Making Alliances Work" paper that the "failure rate for alliances hovers between 60% and 70%", our Alliance with Microsoft delivered and keeps delivering beyond expectations. Not only did Sitecore CMS Azure Edition release on the first day of the Professional Developer Conference on October 28th, 2011, but we have also already made colossal progress by collaborating with Microsoft on a weekly basis to enable the rest of our on-premise capabilities on Azure. Expect to hear a roar about this soon.
"Releasing Sitecore CMS Azure Edition to market does not prove the concept or the value", may you argue; and you’d be right. That said, I believe that our adventure with one of the leading online news channels in Japan, MSN Sankei, epitomizes the amazing ability of our Azure solution to scale to extreme demands, with the right level of reliability and disaster preparedness. And at the risk of sounding redundant if you attended my speech during Kim Akers’ "ISVs Leading the Shift to the Cloud" keynote (watch from 40'32") at the 2011 Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference this summer in Los Angeles, allow me to share more context. MSN Sankei was looking for a WCM system that would allow them to rapidly deploy, with a single-click, any number of websites to any number of Azure content delivery instances worldwide. At that’s precisely what Sitecore CMS Azure Edition is all about. Once the sites are deployed, they can scale quickly to satisfy even extreme demands from customers, regardless of density or location. And while the MSN Sankei solution was architected to support spikes of 20 million page views a month, we ended up recording spikes of up to 600% when the earthquake and tsunami unfortunately hit Japan back in March. And all of that, with zero impact on performance or any service degradation. This unexpected performance is all the more amazing that it came at a critical moment where the Japanese people living inland and abroad were looking for the much-needed situational awareness information, which our solution delivered.
We were so pleasantly surprised by this performance that we decided to bet on Azure again to rapidly deploy another site dedicated to supporting local disaster relief efforts in Japan.
As aforementioned, we are currently working hand-in-hand with Microsoft to deliver anytime soon the rest of our on-premise capabilities to Azure. In fact, our capabilities are already Azure-ready and we are currently just waiting for the imminent Microsoft Azure backend enhancements, which will enable Enterprise-class solutions. More on what's ahead of us in a future blog post. Stay tuned.
Jean-Paul Gomes has spent the last ten years as Senior Product Manager in the Office Business Platform Marketing Group at Microsoft Corporation, responsible for SharePoint Web Content Management and Internet Business. Gomes was instrumental in growing the SharePoint business to $1B+, adding more than 4,600 partners and acquiring more than 17,000 customers. He has developed and led global campaigns and market-perception-shifting programs for SharePoint.
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