Are Your Vendors Choosing the Right Partners? Unveiling the Truth Behind Business Collaborations
Hey. I'm Max Clark. I'm gonna throw some shade right now. I'm gonna try to do it without naming names. There is a lot of scenarios where companies have and identify holes in their service.
Speaker 1:And usually what happens is something in the industry starts consolidating and and decides, like, you need a capability or you you need a feature or you have a natural expansion into a new capability or feature. And in order to plug that, you can't build it yourself. You go out and you partner with somebody else to do it. Now those partnerships can be in lots of different forms. But what I see a lot, when we're talking about this with with our clients going out and acquiring digital infrastructure is I'll just use SASE.
Speaker 1:We'll start naming a little bit of names. You've got somebody that's in the network or SD WAN space that decides that they need to be a full SASE vendor. So now they need to have next generation firewall. They need to have secure web gateway. They need to have CASB.
Speaker 1:They need to have DLP. They wanna have ZTNA. Or maybe it's vice versa. Maybe it's a company that has all those things in the security stack, but doesn't have the SD WAN side on the other side. So on the other side.
Speaker 1:So now these companies can either partner and have an exclusive relationship, and I I view that as, like, a real partnership. Like, okay. That's cool. Or you hear people partnering, and really what that means is that is that one is integrating and reselling the other. And maybe it's, you know, it's it's a cloud service and maybe it's a harbor manufacturer, maybe it's a this, maybe it's that.
Speaker 1:You know, you see this with service providers all the time that go out and they, you know, they acquire and these are the best guys, and we're using them. The first thing I think about in that situation and the first thing I want you to think about in that situation is, is it really the best or does it just give them the best terms and price there are a lot of vendors in the market that people would partner with if they could but can't get access to them and they have to go to an alternative they have to go to a competitor that needs to figure out how to break in but can't break in on their own and is willing to do partnerships and do resale what's the word I'm looking for? Favorable terms to go out and get this activity so that way they can establish a foothold in the market. So when you're looking at companies talking about their partnerships and what their underlying technologies are and how they and how they assemble their things and and you hear partner partner partner partner and just know. It could be the best.
Speaker 1:It could have actually made a decision that is the best in the market, or they could be making a decision on what gives them the best terms and ability to take that to market. And that's not necessarily where you wanna be. Maybe you wanna be there. Maybe you don't wanna be there. But it's something you should be thinking about, and it's something that you should be considering before you make a purchase decision and you get in bed with those companies yourself.
