by: Adrian C. Ott




On January 16, I was invited to moderate a Chief Alliance Officer meeting of twenty-one senior executives of some of the largest firms in the Silicon Valley.  Participants included Senior VP, VP and Sr. Director Representatives from firms such as IBM, Paypal, Cisco, BEA, BMC, Symantec, Cognos, Philips Electronics, Oracle, Symantec, Borland, Informatica, Intel, and others. 

This annual event was sponsored by the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals (ASAP) Silicon Valley Chapter.  This was an open dialogue between the executives to share the latest trends and best practices.

Below are a few insights we uncovered:

• Silicon Valley Alliance Executives see major change ahead caused by enterprise software industry consolidation and new business models such as Software as a Service (SaaS) and IPTV. 

          80% of the attendees characterized the level of change occuring in their alliance ecosystem to
          be "significant" over the next three years.

          20% see "moderate change."

          None of the executives saw "no change."

• Business Ecosystems Are Becoming More Diverse Making Strategic Bets More Difficult 
• SaaS (Software As A Service) Dis-Intermediates Existing Business Models and Creates New Paradigms 
• Technologies such as e-communication and behavioral targeting offer promise to managing increasingly complex global partner ecosystems 
• Approximately 30% of alliance and partner organizations are adopting some form of social media and community technologies like blogging and virtual tradeshows,  but most are "wait and see."

For our free white paper that shares more detail on trends, best practices and our assessment of the implications, please click here: http://www.exponentialedge.com/autopub/siliconvalleychief.html