Eye on Partnership: How Solution Providers Choose Tech Vendors

Technology innovation, fiscal stability, and commitment to partners are some of the criteria.

By T.C. Doyle

“Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door” is a phrase often attributed to American intellectual Ralph Waldo Emerson. There’s scant proof he ever wrote those exact words, but they sure do pervade conventional wisdom.

In the technology industry, though, it takes more than a “better mousetrap” to get partners to beat that path. When selecting which vendors to align with, channel partners focus on three key areas, and in this order:

Technological innovation
Support and commitment
Business opportunity and alignment

The first step is evaluating a potential vendor’s technological innovation(s). As a vendor, you have to ask yourself if your technology offers customers one of the following benefits:

Imp...