Amazon Consulting Unveils Results of 4th Annual State of Partnering Study

Mountain View, CA (Vocus) May 4, 2010

Amazon Consulting, a leading channel services firm dedicated to helping companies elevate the impact of partnering, today unveiled a summary of its comprehensive annual State of Partnering Study. This research reveals detailed trends in vendor partnering challenges, priorities, and spending plans. The global study incorporates data from 55 hardware, software and services vendors, targeting executive-level individuals responsible for channel and alliance partner management. The survey included queries on training and enablement plans, partner segmentation and growth expectations, services delivery engagement models, and a deep-dive on channel spending plans and ROI.

Now in its fourth year of being published, the 2010 State of Partnering Study has become a barometer for helping IT vendors understand their peers plans, priorities and challenges around effectively managing multi-channel strategies, said Diane Krakora, Amazon Consulting CEO. With this research, we provide a pulse on the top priorities and investment areas for the vendor community. It helps our clients benchmark their plans, sanity check their investments and understand what theyre up against in winning and maintaining channel partners mindshare. Based on this years findings, we see vendors focusing on sales skill certification programs, refining their services business value proposition and crafting compelling pay-for-performance channel incentive programs.

Key takeaways from the State of Partnering 2010 include:

Vendors are bullish on sales growth Traditional resellers still rank high as the leading strategic partner segment, however expect strong growth from emerging MSPs and infrastructure or hosting partners.
Business planning activities will be a big focus this year to help understand evolving business models 62% will do selective recruitment in 2010 to fill vertical or geographic gaps. Cloud providers, SaaS developers have emerged.
Vendors seek pre-sales skills and industry knowledge such as technical certifications as top partner competencies.
Continued focus on services enablement programs & engagement models

Amazon Consulting Unveils Results of 4th Annual State of Partnering Study

Amazon Consulting Aids Technology Companies in Elevating the Impact of Partnering with New Thought Leadership Brief and Assessment Tool

Mountain View, CA (Vocus) September 16, 2010

Amazon Consulting, a leading partnering services firm dedicated to helping companies elevate the impact of partnering, recently published a thought leadership brief and self-assessment tool to help technology companies identify their current phase of partnering maturity and development path. By identifying the stage of partnering maturity, vendors will gain a clearer understanding of the roadmap needed to elevate their channel impact and overall company success. Most organizations fit into one of five stages of partnering maturity; companies within each stage face similar pain points in leveraging their partnerships, and need to take similar initiatives to grow to the next stage.

Partnering success comes with an understanding of where your organization falls on the spectrum of engagement and how to progress up the engagement ladder, said Diane Krakora, Amazon Consulting CEO. As organizations increase their success with partnerships, they reap increased sales, expanded services leverage, reach new markets and gain operational efficiencies. Once organizations understand the effect or impact partnering is having, they have to communicate that impact internally and externally and then invest in the infrastructure and systems to measure ongoing performance.

Organizations that havent realized the ROI of partnerships are considered Novice. To initiate their progression and generate increased impact in their organization, they first must realize the value of developing third-party partnerships. Organizations then become Tolerant as they invest in resources such as an individual or team typically in marketing with the responsibility of initiating the first partnerships.

Once the basic partner program is in place, processes and automation initiatives begin to engage and empower partners, and a sales stream is generated, the organization becomes Reliant on the revenue volume. They then move to the Accomplished phase when they globally recognize the value partners bring, in addition to experiencing global sales volume. Accomplished organizations receive 50-80% of revenues from partners and have senior-level executives dedicated to partner execution. When partners are central to every company decision, you truly have a channel Centric organization.

To access Amazon Consultings thought leadership content on Elevating the Impact of Partnering use the links below:

Amazon Consulting Aids Technology Companies in Elevating the Impact of Partnering with New Thought Leadership Brief and Assessment Tool

Datafeedr Partnering With The Pepperjam Network

Montreal, Quebec (PRWEB) November 21, 2008

Datafeedr, a WordPress ecommerce store creation service for affiliate marketers, announced today the integration of all Pepperjam Network merchant datafeeds and coupons. With this integration an additional 202 merchants and 136 coupons are available for Datafeedr members.

In addition to the newly added Pepperjam Network, Datafeedr also provides product datafeeds from numerous merchants from Commission Junction, ShareASale, LinkShare and other affiliate networks representing over 800 merchants and 34 million products from which members can build highly customized, search engine friendly, niche-based affiliate stores.

Datafeedr owners Stefan Everaet and Eric Busch had this to say about the addition of the Pepperjam Network, “After many requests from our members, we’re proud that we can now offer datafeeds and coupons from the Pepperjam Network. Now our members are able to integrate products and coupons from this network into their web sites quickly and easily.”

Michael Kane, one of Datafeedr’s members, commented, “Datafeedr has just set the new benchmark for providing the affiliate marketer with a store building solution, using merchant datafeeds. The service is nothing short of amazing, not only when it comes to ease of use and functionality – but is also backed by incredible support. Datafeedr exceeded my expectations – truly a rare case of over delivery in a world where salesletters seem to be more important than the actual product.”

About Datafeedr:

Datafeedr was founded in April, 2008 by Stefan Everaet and Eric Busch. Datafeedr takes away the technical hurdles of converting raw merchant datafeed files into real web pages by providing a powerful, search engine friendly, push-button store creation system that makes it simple to set up, manage and update a complete affiliate ecommerce store. The Datafeedr store plugin allows members to insert their affiliate stores right into the popular WordPress blogging platform.

For more information, please visit http://www.datafeedr.com or contact Eric or Stefan.

###

Datafeedr Partnering With The Pepperjam Network