Partner, not customer, is king
Document publishing software developer Net-It Software has changed its name to Allegis Corporation and its focus to partnership relationship management. Allegis president and CEO Dennis Ryan explains PRM and why he's reshaping his company around it.
KMWorld: Net-It's document publishing tool was well received by the industry as an easy-to-use solution for sharing information on corporate intranets. Why the move to the new, relatively unknown field of partner relationship management?
Dennis Ryan: The expansion was driven by an opportunity we saw among a portion of our customer base. Our biggest ROI customers were using Net-it Central not just for publishing documents, but for delivering information as a component an entire business process of creating and improving their partnerships.
KMW: What is partnership relationship management?
DR: PRM involves managing the entire partnership lifecycle ; creating, managing, improving business partnerships. Partners can be product development teams, outside sales teams, VARs, suppliers -- any business relationship that indirectly brings product to the end user.
PRM is so huge that it'd be a mistake to address the full range of PRM processes. We need to focus on sales PRM first. Net-It Central is often used to publish sales and marketing or other product information on corporate intranets. We're focusing on particular opportunities, then we can leverage opportunities from one to another.
KMW: Where does your legacy doc publishing business/product fit in to this new strategy?
DR: We will have two products. Net-It Central will be for sharing document-based information. PRM is a completely different set of products, focused on total lifecycle. Part of the partnership lifecycle is sharing info; that's where our heritage is, that's where Net-It Central can be used in a PRM solution.
Net-It Central is a departmental solution. In February we will release a new product to help manage partnerships on an enterprise scale. Pricing, specific focus, and release date will be announced then. We want to first talk about PRM, get a buzz going, make it a digestible term, then release the product information.
KMW: What's the relevance to knowledge management?
One of the goals you want to achieve [in a business partnership] is share internal knowledge with partners. The key difference is that PRM is from a business process perspective, independent of the functional capabilities you need to embrace the business process. One of the capabilities you want to expose are knowledge-based assets.
KM as a component of a business process around PRM is a relevant point. While KM solutions are applied can be applied in many different business processes, we're focusing on one kind of process: managing partnerships. If you really focus on business process, then your solution needs to tap in to existing apps and systems that are necessary durring course of process -- frontoffice, backoffice (transaction-based), and solutions for sharing info w/ outside partners, aka knowledge management.
The key is looking at the business process of a partnership, and then provide solutions for companies to manage the entire life cycle. Information-sharing is part of that process.
KMW: At least in name, PRM sounds akin to customer relationship management (CRM). What's the relationship between the two?
DR: Partner Relationship Management is more or less complimentary with CRM. Where CRM is focused on direct customer relationsihps, PRM addresses indirect relationships with customers through business partners. PRM is the process of reaching customers through sales channel not managing direct relationship through vendor-customer.
In those environments where CRM is deployed, our solution needs to integrate with CRM: Where CRM is present, we expect to leverage those databases, enterprise applications to share customer information stored databases. Our PRM product must integrate with the CRM database so users can access the info and share it with partners.
KMW: With the new focus, who are your new competitors?
DR: Our competition is in two categories. There are younger companies focused on a portion of PRM space: Channelwave, Webridge, Partnerware. They're looking at different segments of the PRM marketplace, but you can put them in the same general categories.
We will also run into competition with vendors offering front- or back-office sales force automation, companies like Aurum, Siebel, and Vantive. We also have to work with them, to build on top of their transaction-oriented applications and expose customer information appropriately in a partner-to-partner extranet.