Forum Sessions

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Acting on the Voice of the Partner

Speaker:
Brooke Cunningham
AVP, Global Partner Programs, Marketing & Operations
Splunk

Is Partner listening a core component of your partner program strategy? Incorporating an integrated approach to partner loyalty can positively shape your partner experience and drive revenue. Most vendors execute components of a loyalty program but don't have all the necessary ingredients—or most importantly—the follow through with action to make it truly impactful. Brooke Cunningham has experience driving Partner Loyalty programs across multiple technology vendors and will share her journey in building a best-in-class Partner Loyalty Program from the ground up. Attend this session to learn best practices and actionable tips and tricks that you can take back with you to drive your Partner NPS and improve loyalty scores.

Building A Thriving Ecosystem: GE Digital's Partner Journey

Speaker:
Karen Dougherty
Vice President Ecosystem and Channels
GE Digital

GE has aligned its organization and partnering ecosystem around its vision for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) vision. In this session, Karen Dougherty addresses—from an ecosystem and channels leader's perspective—what does it mean to become a "digital industrial" company? Her presentation addresses various ways digital transformation is playing a critical role in the market. She'll also discuss how connected assets are transforming businesses not only for GE, for GE's industrial customers, and how their partners are leveraging GE's Predix platform for the Industrial Internet.

GE's partner ecosystem includes technology providers, systems integrators, software developers, independent software vendors, telecom service providers and resellers, who offer a diversified portfolio of technologies and services with the goal to drive powerful game-changing outcomes for customers.Today, the GE Digital Alliance Program, launched in February 2016, has expanded to include more than 600 companies, including enterprise players such as Microsoft, Intel, Accenture, Oracle, EY, PwC, Deloitte, Capgemini, and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS).

Doughterty will provide a case study of how GE Digital's partner ecosystem has been built to help companies with their digital industrial transformation. Combing its domain expertise, its partners, and GE's Predix platform, GE Digital seeks to enable its partners to rapidly scale and accelerate their solutions for the Industrial IoT—and ultimpately to drive increased productivity for end customers through data and analytics with speed and at scale. Attendees will learn about the importance of defining a vision for the Industrial Internet, and how strategic investments in both the platform and in partners helps to attract industrial companies and provide them with tools they need to embark on their own digital industrial transformations.

Customer Experience Is the New Competitive Battleground

Speaker:
Tiffani Bova
Customer Growth and Innovation Evangelist
Salesforce

A positive customer experience is critical to a company's brand and, ultimately, its bottom line. With the proliferation of technology and devices, the customer has become smarter and more powerful. Customers now decide when and how they want to interact with brands, which has had a direct impact on the way companies sell to their customers. While macro trends such as social, mobile, cloud, big data and IoT are forging a new era of engagement, customers are ultimately becoming far more disruptive than the technology itself.

Salesforce's Tiffani Bova will address how companies of all sizes can create new business practices that leverage technology to strengthen collaboration with customers and partners and accelerate sales and growth. Attendees will hear actionable takeaways on how to create a customer-centric business and long-lasting brand loyalty.

Prior to joining Salesforce in early 2016, Bova spent a decade at Gartner, working with hundreds of technology companies as a vice president, distinguished analyst, and research fellow covering sales strategies and channel innovation.

Manage, Scale and Digitize for Enhanced Partnership Agility and Acceleration

Speakers:
Gaye Clemson
Managing Director
Globalinkage Consulting

Alan Leeds
President
Y-Change, Inc.

Mike Maturo
Pre-Sales Engineer
Relayware

Meaghan Sullivan
Vice President, Global SME & Partner Marketing
SAP

Central to digital transformation is the idea of leveraging both new technology and new ways of operating to more effectively engage at every touchpoint in a customer or partner experience lifecycle. Central to alliances that meet the pace and scale of digital transformation solutions is the idea that strengthening alignment, accountability and responsiveness across the alliance ecosystem will accelerate relationship business outcome achievement.

Clemson, Leeds, Maturo, and Sullivan tackle head on the strategic question facing alliance managers today at the intersection of these two ideas: How can alliance leaders effectively leverage new technology and new operating models in ways that will that will make their alliance ecosystem more agile and thereby accelerate outcomes achieved through partnering?

In this session Clemson moderates a panel of leading edge providers of digital transformation technology solutions, in an open Q & A format, to share their perspectives as to the “how” of agile alliance digital transformation including strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

Key topics addressed include:

  • Partner relationship management, alliance portfolio, program and project management
  • Alliance strategy mapping
  • ISO 44001 standard for Collaborative Business Relationships
  • Workflow orchestration platforms
  • "Innovation bets" management solutions
  • Collaboration solutions for connected governance

Strategic Alliances at the Speed-of-Light

Speakers:
John Fanelli
Vice President, Product
NVIDIA GRID

Olimpio DeMarco
Director, Strategic Alliances, Manufacturing & AEC Industries
NIDIA

This dynamic session led by NVIDIA business development executives will connect the dots between company culture, strategy, and partnering success. Fanelli and DeMarco will discuss the core values that guide NVIDIA, market leader in graphics and AI computing, and how these values influence the way its strategic alliances are managed.

Fanelli and DeMarco also will trace the evolution of NVIDIA's business and partnering strategy as the company transitions from a chip/board provider to a platform solutions supplier. This shift has brought increasing complexity to NVIDIA's business and go-to-market strategies. Today, alliance partners play a crucial role—with strategic alliances forging, growing, and evolving in product groups, industry teams, and sales organizations.

Attendees will walk away with these two NVIDIA partnering leaders' recommendations on best practices for managing these alliances, as well as learn from case studies illustrating NVIDIA's Speed-of-Light approach to partnering in a time of dynamic change within your organizations and across your partnerships.

Strategies You Need to Partner Everywhere

Speakers:
Maria Olson
Vice President, Global & Strategic Alliances
NetApp

Andres Sintes
Global Senior Director, Partner GTM Digital Transformation & IoT
Cisco

Steen Graham
General Manager, IoT Ecosystem/Channels, Internet of Things Group
Intel Corporation

Despite the volumes of books, blogs and white papers written about digital transformation, their message has been internally focused. How is this information about digital transformation translated into a strategy with partnering? Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, says this: "The last 10 years of IT have been about changing the way people work. The next ten years of IT will be about transforming your business."

At some point every organization must embrace the collaborative mindset to survive, and its partner ecosystem will reflect that mindset to its customers. "We've moved ... now into more holistic transformations that clearly are based on mobile, social media, digitization and the power of analytics and we think it's really a new era requiring new strategies," says IBM strategy and change consulting leader Saul Berman. But how well is the collaboration mindset baked into corporate and business-unit strategies? Who decides and why?

This session, led by four senior executives who live and breathe strategic collaboration at four leading high-tech companies, will address critical topics for every organization seeking to leverage collaboration to achieve its strategies and its necessary business transformation, including:

  • The strategic planning categories in a Partnering Everywhere environment
  • Critical Success Factors (CSFs) for investing in net-new technology
  • Which partner profiles justify additional investment, versus those that do not
  • Revisions and differences in competitive strategy models

Participants in this session will glean insights and hear answers to critical questions facing every growing or leading technology company, including: Why partner when I can acquire them (or get acquired) or create a joint venture? Which financial justifications change? Which stay the same? How important is culture in various phases of the partnering lifecycle? What due-diligence is required about a partner's ecosystem? If no legal/ethical issues arise, what prevents stakeholders from partnering with anyone they want?

Partnering is a critical element of the strategic planning process. Your partner portfolio must align with your strategy and execution milestones. Partnering processes fragmented by business unit, geography, and/or industry ultimately fall back on strategic planning. Soon "Partnering Everywhere" will not be called out as critical to achieving your business strategy; it simply will be "business as usual."