Diamond Broadens Its Circle of Friends

Integrator Diamond Technology Partners (VARBusiness 500 rank: 230) is rapidly expanding its circle of industry friends in an effort to provide its clients with end-to-end e-business solutions.

The company's recently launched digital strategy practice, dubbed Diamond MarketSpace Solutions, struck a number of new alliances with technology partners in the past few weeks to expand its offerings in content management, application servers, database management, Web hosting, systems platforms, data storage, customer service and e-commerce merchandising, hosting and portals.

"We have been working in this core business of delivering e-business solutions with various companies for years," says partner Steve Gertz, who heads up Diamond's alliance initiative. "With the acceleration in the number of companies and categories of players, it's become increasingly important to know who they are, what they're doing and who can help us solve our clients' problems faster."

Earlier this month, the company formed strategic alliances with Web hosting service provider Digex, e-business integrator Osage Systems Group (VARBusiness 500 rank: 189) and Web content provider iSyndicate.

"We are evolving into this and we have identified something on the order of 600 companies out there doing various Web-enabling functions," says Gertz. "What we'd like to do is categorize the players as best we can so we can pick two or three of the best-of-breed."

DMS alliance relationships will typically be made in three forms: awareness relationships to provide DMS and clients with an early look at products, tools and applications; strategic alliances for joint marketing and solution development; and preferred vendor agreements allowing preferred access to products and services.

Diamond, which has DMS research labs in Chicago, San Francisco and London, will announce roughly five new partnerships per month through the end of the year. "We'll build a stable of these and then sit back and flesh them out a little more, manage them and see if they actually helped in delivering the products," Gertz says.