
I have spent many years working with business partners, and as I consider the many partners I have worked with, there is a type of business that always seems to do very well. It’s the companies that identify themselves according to their specific capability strength (e.g. analytics, collaboration, security), as opposed to vendor expertise (e.g. IBM, Oracle, HP). Instead of saying “we are true blue,” meaning that all they do is IBM, they say, “we are an IT consulting firm specializing in analytics”, or “we are Enterprise Security experts”.