Ecosystem Aces

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 the decision to partner with Dynatrace instead of building a solution internally.  Dynatrace’s solution was very scalable and supported all of the platforms they were looking to work with (Azure, AWS, etc.). Now their relationship is much more strategic as partners. We caught up with Pieter and had a live conversation from #SAPTechEd to talk about shared customers, working with SAP, and the importance of being involved in the totality of a product cycle.

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 has become more and more significant in recent years by providing services like ensuring data is still available for audits and the like.  For Datavard, it doesn’t matter where the data lives (if it is in the cloud or not) as long as they have the proper access they need to the data. We spoke with Thomas live from #SAPTechEd about his partnership with SAP, working together with joint customers, and keeping customers the center focus.

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’s about people, and co-innovation is of paramount importance in understanding this. We got together with Sven at this year’s #SAPTechEd to talk about collaboration, breaking silos, and the important of openness with customers and partners.

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 their new agency partner program that WP Engine started, and it includes key components to enable these partners to grow their business with WordPress as a core component of their stack.   In this edition of Alliance Aces, we spoke with Lisa about their various partner levels, ensuring their partner program provided tangible value, and an inside look at how this new program became so successful.

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.