A couple of questions here at Dreamforce’s partner session panel discussion have gotten a bunch of laughs from the partners in the audience:

“Last year you said build in Apex, now you’re saying build an independent tool, and now you’re saying get leads for salesforce.com. . .”

“What about AppStore? Where is that going – I haven’t heard anything about it this year.”

and from the panel: “Ask not what salesforce can do for you. . .”

Comments like these are at the heart of partnering, and occupy a bunch of time for me: can you stay with the same message for your partners over a series of years. But I am struck with the misalignment of partners in so many cases: partners want to sell product to salesforce’s users, and salesforce wants new leads. So that’s always going to be difficult.

The trouble is that folks that are willing to go and take on the acquisition costs of winning net new business probably don’t want to give that away with nothing in return, and so in lies the rub.

Business alignment drives everything, so setting up the business with partners at the center makes for a very different world than trying to stick them in the middle of a customer-vendor relationship. Very different.

Bobby Napiltonia also offered free access to the PRM module for all SFDC partners. Good stuff

I am sitting in salesforce.com’s partner conference right now. They just went through some great coverage about where they are working, where the opportunity is for partners, and where salesforce.com intends to build. They were open about what they were doing, and that is a great thing for partners, who want to make safe investments.

They also highlighted some interesting cases where salesforce has sold nearly 40,000 seats to a Japanese firm, but not for the CRM – but rather for the platform!

Which brings up another point: they are redubbing the platform as “the force.”

Good branding. Now if they could only change their ticker

All that ribbing aside,  SaaS is going through an inflection. Business Objects’ Steven Lucas last night at the “after dark” party said that they have reached 50k subscribers, which is a big amount of recent growth. Salesforce’ platform sale is a huge unprecedented event.

So all that makes me more excited than ever about Mashups and the Mashup Exchange.

And if you’re looking for funding, look to Emergence Capital, a 5-year old VC that is tightly focused on SaaS, and is looking to invest in “technology-enabled-service” which includes BPO’s, information services companies, and SaaS.  They are looking for people to build standalone companies, and are asking themselves the question: when will the force platform be ready for people to build on it?

Things are heating up.

This morning René kicked off a terrific presentation around SaaS and how Serena is going SaaS. He walked through a video around a choice: going SaaS or staying with the traditional model, then walked through several principles behind SaaS:

1. Multitenancy
2. Security
3. Democracy
4. Community

This was one of the best presentations I’ve seen in terms of taking people from being unaware of what SaaS really means to the state where they can understand not only the promise of SaaS, but also how they could get themselves into the business.

This is where things got really interesting: René then talked about the Mashup Exchange: a marketplace for mashups and associated services, which drives value for partners and customers.

Since I am driving the Mashup Exchange, this means a lot to me – so many SaaS companies have stumbled around partners, and I am intent on us getting it right.

That means we learn from the past, and emulate the best attributes we have seen in systems in the past.

Simply put: protect partners’ business for the long run, give them a fair and free marketplace to sell their goods, and provide real value in creating a new opportunity for them.

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you’ve seen posts about Serena’s Mashup strategy in the New York times, eWeek, and tons of other places.

But that’s not really funny.

Giving me free reign over a website is pretty funny (funny dangerous, not funny haha). I just finished writing some copy, and me laughing woke up my wife. Now – she didn’t think that was too funny, but I have a feeling my geek humor will resonate with some. You be the judge – keep your eyes peeled for some new things to crop up on the Serena website next week, and tell me if my humor resonates, or rings hollow?

and that’s all I’m going to say for now;-)

To borrow a concept from the software architecture world, and apply it to business relationships, is the best way to describe what is happening in the world of online application development.

So maybe you can help me coin the phrase: “n-tier partner model.”

The concept is simple: partners build things, which other partners can build on and combine into other things, and which again can be combined. So the number of tiers are multiple, and stackable.

Sounds complicated – but it’s really not that complicated. It’s actually simple.

People build services, services have the capability to be combined with other services, and themselves packed into other services, and voila – there you have it.

Had a very stimulating strategy session today with a start-up. They were interested in talking about partnership, but we quickly started into talking about corporate strategy.

Partner strategy is an outgrowth of a solid corporate strategy. If you think you’ve got a good corporate strategy, ask yourself how it instructs your alliances or partnership strategy. If the corporate strategy can’t guide and inform the partner strategy, it’s back to the drawing board on the corporate strategy.

But partnership really is simple.

1. Make a list of what you want

2. Make a list of what others want

3. Make a list of what you’re willing to give, and how much.

4. Figure out where the intersections are in 1, 2, and 3.

Simple huh? But it’s not.

Many startups latch on to a partner in order to quickly grow a business. Pretty soon, the partnership takes over the startup! The solution: write down at the outset what you want to achieve, and revisit that written description from time to time. See if you’re boiling the frog (the market) or if you’re being boiled.

Boil or be boiled. Now that’s simple.

In 1989 the Harvard Business Review published an article around Partnership and Competition being points along the same continuum. This is a fairly obvious point, but it is a subtle truth that reveals how some of the assumptions we make are so unconscious that they fade into the background.

Any competitor is a potential partner, and any partner a potential competitor. Which they become is your choice.

So partnership in tech, which is a fluid field allowing for rapid structural change, allows for more flux in relationships than other fields. But what defines how we see other companies in tech?  It is really about deciding what you are, and then also knowing what you want to become, and how you plan to get there.

Barring a solid understanding of those three things, which are the core of corporate strategy and planning, partnerships are dangerous. They can easily take over your company. In some cases that’s a good thing: witness how many VAR organizations have grown up around some of the largest software vendors. In some cases there are entire companies that were built out of a partnership gone wild, with the express goal of letting that partnership subsume the company in the form of an acquisition.

In the end, larger companies that build successful partnerships are good at the same thing that makes good relationships on the personal level: boundaries.

In the end, deciding what you are not going to do becomes more powerful that what you are going to do.