Research: Why VARs Partner With Fellow VARs

While recent research of VARBusiness 500 companies revealed only a small gap between those solution providers that prefer vendor loyalty and exclusivity vs. open relationships (read "Is Vendor Exclusivity Right For You?"), when it comes to partnering with their own kind, the responses were overwhelming.

A whopping 72 percent of solution providers said they prefer to partner with VARs offering products and services that complement their own--a strategy they say better serves customers looking for complete solutions. Among the respondents, 35 percent said they tend to look for partners that specialize in indirectly related technologies and services (offerings that don't necessarily go hand-in-hand with their own but might be useful when used in conjunction).

Henry Cheli, president of Herkimer, N.Y.-based Annese & Associates (No. 368 on the VARBusiness 500), says that he tends to partner with solution providers that have expertise in areas other than his own.

Cheli says that he often works with other VARs to "round out projects" in terms of what the customer needs beyond his company's core expertise. "We'll partner if there's no use investing a lot of money, people and training in an area that we don't see as being repetitive," he explains. "In areas that are core to our business, we handle the design, implementation and maintenance ourselves, but for things that aren't core, we have relationships with partners to keep expenses down."

Robert Swanson, president of Newport Beach, Calif.-based Delta Max (VAR500 No. 451) looks for partners with complementary skills. Alliances with peers, he says, generally involve repeat engagements rather than one-off projects. That is, the partners he has worked with in the past will continue to bring him in on engagements in the future, creating a comfortable, repeatable process. "They find me, and the ones I work with keep bringing me back in," Swanson says.

That process is similar for Annese's Cheli, who says he is familiar with the local talent after being in the technology business for 35 years.

"If we don't know someone, we'll find them," he says. "Certain partners we use maybe aren't certified on Cisco IP telephony, so they'll call us to partner [in that area]. It's about collaboration, every single day."

Swanson, who says these partnerships often work both ways, especially when you're on the consulting side of the business, cites an example: "A customer sees an opportunity for a wireless application but needs help figuring out the best way to deploy it," he says. "So they ask us to do a study. Then I'll talk to the CEO and find out what their problems are and say, 'If you deployed wireless this way, it would cost you this and you'd get these benefits.' The logical question coming out of that then is this: 'Do you have someone you could recommend?'"