Confession, I was tempted to make this a nod to original Master of the Universe himself, He-man, as I watched the trailer for the film the other day. But you'll be pleased to know I've invoked a modicum of constraint.

A VP from a SaaS company said the other day that software suppliers want to be the centre of the universe. And he's so right. They like to think that they can fulfil all your needs, even when their sales person knows that certain features are weak. And sure, if you're Microsoft in 2020, you told people that Teams is as good as Zoom. And because of their position as an oligopoly, every employee in Enterprise then had to suffer for two or three years while they made it less clunky. But it's wishful thinking for most SaaS.

It might be fine to live in a walled garden for parts of your business that aren't differentiated like raising purchase orders. However, when it comes those business activities that deliver competitive advantage, like tracking progress on construction sites, business units are less willing to compromise. Especially in low margin businesses like infrastructure. People want to use the best tool for the job so they can reduce risk and not incur excessive man hours wrangling with software.

What we then see happening is the need for common data environments and ways of people exchanging information from between incompatible software.

Businesses will always do what's right for them and build interfaces to close the gap. The downside is that these interfaces might need tweaking every time there's a new release to any of the software. Leaving aggro for the business.

There's a better way. Which is technology partnerships where integrations are supported and the client has a full end-to-end solution while using the best software. And it's a win for tech companies - it opens up new use cases as it isn't such a pain to keep the data up to date across tools. And it defends a tech company's competitive position against losing out to someone else who's made a slightly better job of the Master-of-the-universe play.

So, what's the hard part?

Companies find it easy to identify potential partners. And moderately easy to sign an MOU and issue a press release. The hard part is turning the partnership from announcement to delivering value for the partners and for end users.

The missing ingredient is proof - finding the real meaningful value. Because once you have a sharp understanding of what end users are trying to accomplish and a shared understanding of the easiest way to technically achieve it, all the other things you need fall into place, like senior stakeholder buy in, resolving contractual matters. The line of sight to value and revenue is clear for all involved.

How do we do that? A carefully crafted discovery and workshop process. In 90 days, you'll have an integration validated with a customer, and a path to replicating that with more scope and/or more customers.

As one VP partnerships said, "Without this we would have gotten here eventually, but it would have taken 3–5x longer."

So, if you have a partnership that won't ship, reply HE-MAN and we can have a chat. Equally, if your IT team is trying to push you into a walled garden of a single vendor, reply SHE-RA and I'll give you some quick tactics to use.

Have a great weekend,

Helen