Anyone that has been in the IT industry, especially on the software side, for any length of time will almost certainly have worked with one of the big “hyperscale” Cloud vendors. You’ve probably partnered with them at some level and worked with a partner manager to get your products registered in one of the online stores or made efforts to achieve some level of certification for your company.

The two largest hyperscalers – AWS and Microsoft Azure, are massive businesses within even larger organizations. They have tens of thousands of staff and hundreds of different marketing and partner programs designed to attract ISV’s to develop applications on their platform and bring with them their customer base.
The sheer number and complexity of the programs the hyperscalers run makes it almost impossible for a small or medium sized ISV to ensure they take full advantage of all the resources a hyperscaler can throw at them. And the publicly promoted programs are just the start. Deep inside the sales, marketing, partnering, product, and other myriad departments, there are people and budgets and resources that are available to an ISV that knows how to present their business case in the right way, to the right person.
Some of the “hidden” resources/funds/incentives available include deep technical skills and resource that doesn’t suit programmatic promotion to the channel. This might take the form of UI or architecture design assistance, development tools or compute power for dev/test and demonstrations.
On the commercial side, having a deep connection into different parts of the sales organization can be invaluable. Being able to present a product to a sales team and explain where it fits and showcasing a joint win that helped a hyperscaler account manager achieve quota can open more doors and drive more business than any number of adverts or paid search placements.
Connections into the marketing organization might result in an invite to share the stage at an event with a hyperscaler senior executive, or might earn your PortCo a joint customer case study that the hyperscaler will promote. Having your PortCo’s brand pushed into the market alongside the hyperscaler’s logo is invaluable and will drive more business than anything a PortCo can do on their own. It will also improve sales close rates thanks to that old saying “you can tell a good company by the company it keeps”. A joint press release or case study, or a shared stage with a hyperscaler exec will do wonders for your PortCo’s brand awareness and brand credibility.
Another old saying that is still very relevant when it comes to leveraging hyperscaler resource is “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”. When it comes to knowing what help is available, nothing beats insider information on who does what and how things work inside the hyperscaler.
One more important aspect to consider is that in these hyper complex companies you can spend enormous cycle time and potentially money on the wrong things and wrong people. Or maybe the timing is just not right. All the hyperscalers have innovation people that want to push the latest technology that might not be market ready for you to bet on.
When a PE owned PortCo is building their alliances plan and team, make sure they are recruiting people with real world experience of working for a hyperscaler and who have inside experience of helping ISV partners build their business leveraging hyperscaler resource.
And of course, if you can’t find that perfect person to manage the hyperscaler relationship, Wingspan Equity has exactly this insider knowledge, skill set and experience and can co-pilot your alliances team to hyperscaler partnering success. We can help you cut through the hyperscaler information overload in a pragmatic and direct way.
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