Powering Partner Relationship Management

This
guest post is written by Microsoft Partner Accenture.

As the Microsoft Global High Tech Summit comes into view, it
becomes increasingly apparent that there are fundamental changes taking place
in the High Tech sector.  Businesses
today face unprecedented challenges and opportunities. In particular, we are
seeing a drive amongst leaders in the electronics and high tech space to review
their current channel models' ability to efficiently and effectively
scale.  These leaders are also reevaluating their ability to bring
multiple parties together to collaboratively market, sell and service end
customers.

Research
produced by Accenture in December 2010 revealed that among five strategic business
activities, 30 percent ranked managing channel partnerships as the most
fundamental.  This is a significant shift, from only five years ago when revenues
gained through indirect channels by electronics and high-tech companies made up
only 30 percent (or less). 
Now approximately 65 percent of revenue for Global 2000 enterprises is driven
or influenced by indirect partners.

Traditional customer relationship management (CRM) solutions
lack the ability to jointly manage
business with partners.  At Accenture we are seeing leading
companies investing in collaborative Partner Relationship Management (PRM)
strategies and applications that offer shared infrastructure to vendors and
partners. The emergence of a collaborative business model for PRM is helping
organizations team effectively with partners to achieve greater global reach,
to increase revenues and to make significant strides on the road to high
performance.

Software as a Service (SaaS) or
partner relationship management capabilities in the cloud are enabling the
emerging collaborative business models.  Subscribing to PRM applications
hosted in "the cloud" provide for faster availability of partner relationship
processes to the partner ecosystem, greater business agility and lower
infrastructure and ongoing maintenance costs.

During
the Summit, you are invited to learn more about our Enterprise
PRM on Demand solution by visiting the
Accenture and Avanade booth for a demonstration. This new offering is designed
to help organizations build more dynamic, collaborative and profitable
relationships with their channel partners.

Ron
Ref is a senior executive in the Accenture CRM Service Line. He can be reached
at ron.ref@accenture.com.