A partnership is easy to setup; just grab a phone, call the company which gives out the partnership, sign an agreement and off you go. Now that’s the easy part.

A good partnership sees both companies which are part of it investing time and effort into the product and partnership itself. Some people might see reselling as retail business, but the key to success lies in applying the product within your projects and benefit from it. Otherwise, you can just as easy give up the partnership right away.

Yesterday, we signed our 4th - and final - product partnership with Forward Search. Already being a partner with Umbraco, EPiServer and EPM Live this search tool can add something extra to all these products. Also, search will become more and more important in the coming years when data is ever expanding and the tools to find the information becoming more and more simplistic. At least, from an end-user’s perspective.

Having the right products in place - through partnerships - to provide our clients with a broad range of standard solutions gives us the flexibility to focus on the end solution. Each product has a basic setup, but each product also needs to be installed, configured and implemented before it can be used. We won’t focus on the basics anymore; somebody, somewhere has already done this for us and will continue to improve his product. Using shared benefits we make sure both companies focus on what they do best.

I have become a firm believer of partnerships and live them to the fullest when it comes to integrating them within our software solutions. It only works though, when the partner ships the product and starts his first sale. That is the only way to get things going, because until then, the partnership remains on paper only.