Services Opportunity in the land of BI
Author: Hiten Rathod, Head – Strategic Alliances & Channel
We are MAIA are 100% product company and our mission is to churn out innovative products in BI space. Till now we have churned out 3 version releases and now the 4th version 1KEY Agile is on brink of the commercial release. This was possible only because we did not enter into professional services space. This does not mean that professional services revenue in BI did not have opportunity to scale. Ideally we would prefer to do everything ourselves. It’s the best way to make sure your know-how stays under your own roof. Yet we took the way of having external experts helping us with implementation. Fact is, we don’t have enough manpower, and neither can we be expected to know everything about everything about each industry domain.
We are not an expert in all aspects of every sector or domain specific industry verticals. We are a primarily a software product developer, not an organizational consultant. Therefore we work together with partners that specialize in specific industrial sectors and disciplines. Partners who are able to support 1KEY BI continually in improving its software, by providing detailed reports on experiences gained with previous implementations. Through this partnership with consulting firms, software manufacturers, and technology vendors, we with our partners leverage our collective strengths to offer integrated solutions that measure performance and improve profitability. This helps customers achieve significant return on investment.
We ensure partners are close and early involvement with all of our implementations. Their involvement starts with problem analysis and reporting definition, moving from analytical descriptions through to implementation, hardware choice, and at the end of the road, to system management and hosting. Partners are specialists themselves, and cannot be expected to know everything. We help selecting the right partner to handle the 1KEY BI implementation which is crucial for corporate MIS strategy.
We then have designed a variety of partnership opportunities, including consulting, software, platform, and distribution programs. Our partners take advantage of these programs and assist customers in measuring performance and driving profitability. Our partners are organized in three main categories. The partner categories are OEM partners, reseller partners, and consulting partners
Our partners are only entitled to carry the official partner and products logo after they have demonstrated their qualifications in a particular area of specialization. Naturally, we keep a close finger on the pulse to ensure that the required quality standards are satisfied. Training and experience of partners are important, as is customer satisfaction with the performance of that partner. It is important to understand, therefore, that the partner and products logo itself cannot work miracles.
This position will not be achieved over night but will be the result of long-standing relationships, forged on the basis of a mutual enthusiasm and an understanding of common interests. As with any partnership, the affection is a two-way affair. In our view, the partner program is successful if it brings together the interests of the three parties: our partner, we ourselves, and the MAIA product user. This shared interest is seen as the cornerstone, and the key criterion on which MAIA wants builds its co-operation structures.
The ultimate objective, of course, is to deliver added value to MAIA product users. The 1KEY BI product user benefits most from an MAIA partner who contributes the necessary experience to a project, is fully acquainted with the customer’s business processes, and has access to the extensive knowledge and expertise of our product 1KEY.
Posted on January 25th, 2008 by Hiten Rathod
Filed under: Business Intelligence, Entrepreneurship
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