Partnerships expected from a week of conferences

This could be a week of significant developments in terms of partnerships in the cloud, with both Netsuite and Microsoft running major conferences in the USA where announcements of new partnerships that add strength and depth to their respective services are expected to be announced.

Netsuite CEO, Zach Nelson, is already a major fan of building partnerships and it is expected that the company’s Suiteworld Summit will see partner-based service additions to its core ERP and business management SaaS capabilities. Nelson is certainly someone who sees the value in partnering with vendors that already have a complementary expertise, rather than trying to re-invent other peoples’ wheels, himself.

One such example of this is expected to be a partnership with BI and analytics vendor, Birst, which could also indicate the direction of travel Netsuite is planning in terms of future partnerships. BI and analytics are certainly an important addition for any business running, or thinking of running, cloud-based ERP.

This is a direction for the company that adds a core capability that many users will find beneficial and is an essential component for any business looking to build aggregated, tailored business service packages intended to hit specific market segments.

That is also likely to be a partnership trend that should feature at Suiteworld. The ability of cloud-delivered services to provide smaller, agile businesses with the same levels of comprehensive business management as their large enterprise cousins has been written about many times, but the part that is still missing is the need for specialist service providers to appear that not only understand the requirements of specific business sectors, but can also identify and aggregate together the applications and services that can deliver those appropriate business services, packaged up to the smaller businesses.

So the ability, as would seem to be the case with a Birst/Netsuite partnership, for businesses to source pre-configured packages of SaaS-delivered business management, ERP, BI and analytics should not only attract the interest of larger businesses looking to move to the cloud, or run two-tier ERP, but also service aggregators looking to deliver business management to smaller companies that do not have the resources or skillsets to implement such solutions themselves.

Partnerships are also expected to be a feature at the Microsoft TechEd conference, though these are likely to be down at the more technical level of extending the company’s growing service capability in areas such as building hybrid cloud services.

It is expected that the company will announce new partnerships that provide more secure ways to connect to the cloud, simplified cloud storage, and new developments that help customers architect, deploy and manage global-scale services. The company is said to see such announcements as building lout the essential ‘connective tissue’ between on-premises investments and the public cloud.

There are also announcements expected on ways businesses can protect their cloud investments, with the company broadening its efforts to keep data safe in the cloud with expanded data loss prevention, an anti-malware agent for Azure, enhanced disaster recovery and encryption technologies.

With its latest Windows 8 version operating system for smartphones and tablets starting to generate review plaudits, there are also announcements expected at the event on developing applications and services with a strong mobile-first/cloud-first bias.

The company is expected to announce a series of tooling and framework updates that enable enterprise developers to embrace development opportunities with next-gen cloud and mobile apps, including the next version of ASP.NET, Visual Studio tooling for the Apache CordovaTM platform and an extension of Visual Studio Online.