'Microsoft played matchmaker on this'

As part of CRN's Rising Stars report highlighting the most disruptive, most profitable and fastest-growing firms in the channel, New Signature UK founder Dan Scarfe opens up on his firm's partner-to-partner strategy

Last October, Microsoft Azure specialist New Signature forged an alliance with SAP partner Edenhouse Solutions to help move SAP clients into the cloud, and was highlighted as one of seven firms pushing the boundary in CRN's Rising Stars report. UK founder Dan Scarfe says the alliance has already yielded results, but warns that the peer-to-peer model doesn't come without its pitfalls

Partner: New Signature UK

VAR 300 ranking: 280th

Pushing the boundary in: Peer-to-peer partnerships

You recently forged an alliance with SAP counterpart Edenhouse. What's the rationale for adopting a partner-to-partner approach?

There are definite merits in it because it's very difficult for one organisation to do lots and lots of different things. We can do all of the Microsoft cloud bit, and can now [with Edenhouse] onboard SAP, which is one of the most complex applications in the world. Microsoft played matchmaker on this: ‘You guys are the best at Azure, and you guys at SAP - maybe you should talk'.

In other areas, partner to partner is more challenging. It depends on how close the skill sets are. There are other, well-known examples of organisations that have come together to do technology which is much closer, for instance one partner doing Azure and the other doing Office365. Those partnerships are much more difficult because there is a lot of overlap between the two technologies and they are such natural bedfellows that it makes sense for one organisation to skill up in both sets.

What tangible benefits has the Edenhouse partnership yielded so far?

It has meant that we can have conversations with customers we wouldn't have been able to have before, as SAP are one of the primary workflows that organisations want to move to the cloud. We have at least a dozen projects in flight and proposals we are working on at the moment, and we wouldn't have previously been able to bid on any of them. They are starting to trickle through to real professional and managed services work.

Some onlookers have credited a rise in the partner-to-partner model to the increasing complexity of the technology landscape. Do you go along with that point of view?

Yes, absolutely. Again it comes down to how different the platforms are. We cover all of the Microsoft cloud bar Dynamics, which is a phenomenally big and complex platform in its own right, so we partner with another firm in Dynamics, but the rest of it - Azure, Office365 and enterprise mobility and security - we see those as indivisible for most enterprise customers so those ones we believe are best delivered by organisation.

What lessons have you learned from your peer-to-peer engagements?

There are a number of challenges, the biggest one of which is probably culture. Do the organisations stand for the same things? Do both organisations believe in delivering value to the customer, or does one of them believe in making as much as they can for themselves? That is something we see very often, where companies are just wired differently, so you have to jump over that hurdle first.

Some of the other big challenges we've seen are who leads a particular engagement. These will be joint engagements, but we might be introducing Edenhouse to a customer, or Edenhouse might be introducing one to us. In one you're the prime contractor and in the other you're the sub-contractor, and how do you deal with that? When one of the pair is taking first-line support calls from the customer, how do they escalate that to the other partner if there's a problem, and vice versa? So we've had to do a huge amount of work with them to design that model, and you have to do that before you even start selling anything as you have to have your answers right before you pitch to the customer.

Which leads to one of the other problems: how do you go to market together? One organisation's sales motion might be very different from another partner's sales motion. We've done a lot of work, at least for a smaller engagement, to package up what we do and they've packaged up what they do, so we don't necessarily have to have a pre-sales person from each partner at every meeting.

A link to the full Rising Stars report can be found here.

All the data from the Rising Stars report was drawn from VAR 300, which is available exclusively to CRN Essential subscribers.