Here's what's great about Jeremy Allaire. He's the hotshot technologist who co-founded the eponymous Allaire company, became Macromedia CTO when Macromedia bought his company, and now helms startup Brightcove.

What's great is that Allaire at least seems to get the notion of partnership. Very few hot shot tech companies—and an amazing number of larger tech powers (are you listening Oracle?)--understand the value of a great partner ecosystem. And sharing the wealth with that ecosystem.

Allaire spoke Wednesday morning at the MIT Enterprise Forum in Boston.

Oracle partners continue to beef--anonymously of course--that they spend so much time fending off Oracle's direct sales teams that they have less time to sell. That' s not good for vendor OR partner.

It's important to ally your company with people—both internal to your startup and outside it—to bring in talents you may not have, Allaire said. "There is a trap for entrepreneurs [in that they tend] to believe their own bullshit," Allaire noted. "Your partners need to be wary of your limitations. You need balance."

Another bullet item: Leverage the brands of your customers and partners as much as possible. "The brand affinity to Disney or whatever is a lot more than for a startup." Allaire noted.

Continuing: "Build a trust relationship with those partners who will be willing to support you publicly."

And again: "Establish the brand, trust and credibility in your market place through reference customers and partners."

Now agreeing that "partner" is a broad term and Allaire in some contexts talked about partners in the venture capital community and the legal profession. But he also referred by name to platform companies, carriers, cable companies, device manufacturers, cable companies. He also noted that most of those legacy powers realize that when it comes to the proliferation of high-quality online video, it will likely be smaller, young companies who will innovate and step into leadership roles.

His view is, as evidenced by Youtube, that video is becoming as ubiquitous as text as an online media type.

Cambridge-based Brightcove lets customers aggregate and private-label their own video content. Examples he cited were the IFC Channel and Elle Magazine, which is extending beyond its glam mag roots into video.

Brightcove's syndication marketplace now offers 1,400 lines of professional content (as opposed to the user-generated videos of Youtube fame.)

Allaire demonstrated VBS.TV as an example of the video-rich sites Brightcove's technology can enable. You gotta love the VBS tagline: Rescuing you from television's death-like grip.

For more from the conference see this from Rafe Needleman.

Allen Stern of Centernetworks is also covering the event.

Oh, another highlight: Allaire seems to have had it up to here with the whole mash-up, Web 2.0 craze, calling it a fad.

"There are about a thousand startups [there] and about a half-a-dozen meaningful exits," he opined.