Project Partnerships Project: Background, Vision, and Principals

What is the stated Vision of the Partner program: By extending, complementing or completing XXX’s overall solution, The XXX Platform Program enables our clients to thrive and transform their business. Our strategy is to provide targeted comprehensive solutions for specific roles within organizations that seamlessly merge connectivity, data, and capability. The program allows many levels from full self-service to complete integration with XXX’s sales, support, and infrastructure across all our markets and solutions. How?

By empowering key individuals in the company to help manage the evaluation and prioritization process and manage the due diligence

By guiding them through the process By promoting the value of the program to partners / clients

Aligned to product strategies to determine needs / gaps and rank them by priority o Determine if we do – or we search for ("Templatized" process)

Gate process - hypothesis MRD – proactive approach Analysis and approval

Includes business commitments (revenue, resources, etc)

Having a clear and defined set of programs and tiers with benefits that can be communicated

Modify and / or incorporate systems from XXX (infrastructure) to support a holistic approach o Integrate to pricing, support, services systems o Integrate legal in process o Holistically support the lifecycle from integration, promotion, placement, billing,

contracts, support, sales Principles: These are a set of guiding principles that help resolve development decisions. To get to the principles – you have to understand the core objectives of the product. For example, if you expect the final product to be completely self-service or touch-less from services – than this is the place to state it.

Transparent o to the XXX Client (What it does, how to use it) o To XXX staff (why and with who we partner (minimum requirements))

Drives revenue or indirect revenue Completes a solution for a user in our client base

Integrated at all levels (support, service, sales)

Self Service where-ever possible (by clients and partners as applicable)

In line with product principles by LOB (Market Driven – not deal driven) Integration experience

o Surface holistically in XXX wherever possible o API integration via XXX Data Services wherever possible o

Project Partnerships Project: Background, Vision, and Principals

What is the Alliance / Partner Program? A Strategic Alliance is a relationship between one or more organizations that through the combination of resources can create significant and sustainable value for everyone involved. For XXX, the goal of a strategic partnership is that the combined capability will either:

Defend current market position

Expand market position

Increase revenues

Improve company brand

Improve ease of use for our clients

Defining partnership / alliance by category: There are a few different paths that will drive the queue for who to work with, but first we should start with some simple definitions.

Strategic: Alliances that ‘complete where we cannot be the best’ or ‘expand and entrench XXXt’ or ‘provide new business opportunities. Examples of ‘Strategic’ partnerships would include:

Create an Alternatives data network linking service providers and XXX Product providers with XXX Consumers

Tactical: Result directly from something in the business cycle – i.e. client desire / demand, sales need during a cycle, capability enablement (hosting). Examples of Tactical partnerships might be:

Build out integration to Salesforce, Factset, other

They may encompass:

Reseller style arrangements – embed our capability in another organization which in turn sells

that capability

Data Initiatives – building content for new data offerings, integrating to external systems via

data feeds to / from our products

Development initiatives – external firms building capability with / without our assistance on our

behalf which will be surfaced via our applications

Referral relationships – mostly a tactical relationship where XXX and the partner are selling their

own solution, but we have coordinated integration/marketing

How are Alliances Sourced: Executive Direction: XXX executive desires relationship with an external partner and / or is looking to support a strategic initiative.

Solutions Consulting: The solutions consulting team has identified a product / capability gap and or need for external capability to fulfill sales objectives and due to client demand

Partner Team: The Partner team in development of new capability has defined enhanced features / data or integration needs to support development, sales, and or solution completeness. Additionally revenue drivers may apply or partner negotiations may play a role (we’ll partner if you prioritize X, we’ll provide leads if your support Y)

Project Partnerships Project: Background, Vision, and Principals

External Requests: Outside firm contacts XXX to request partnership – access our distribution channel

Other Source: These can be the development organization, legal organization, outside partners

How are alliances prioritized? Partnerships need to be managed according to a matrix (the art / not science) of partnerships. Various considerations come into play:

Revenue impact (projected revenue – indirect (increases sales) vs. direct (revenue share)

Breadth of impact (how many solutions, how many LOB’s)

Client need

Strategic over Tactical

Complexity / duration (Solution impact, nature of effort)

Impact on development resources / projects

What activities occur in Partnership?

Develop Strategic partnership plans based on core product / firm-wide thesis

o Act on these independent of tactical partnerships

Management of inbound partnership requests and application against LOB / market / sales

needs

o Inbound requests can come from

Sr. Executives / Board

External clients

Sales team due to engagement activity

Regional offices

Direct contact from external firms

Product owners

Product Management or alliance team

Analysis work with current presales / sales team and via market research to determine needed

capability and apply build / buy / partner model.

o A matrices of time to market, strategic nature of the capability, internal vs. external

expertise plays into this decision process.

o Needs can be driven by the market, regulations, or strategic direction

Development of a strategic partner plan by product and Line of Business resulting from the

analysis

o Must include preferred partnership models by nature

Data: Either market and or other data types necessary fulfil a business function

Content: Documents, research, other information to consume untouched by our

clients

Project Partnerships Project: Background, Vision, and Principals

Capability: Direct embedding of functional capability in one of our applications

(classic / new)

Business Requirements documentation – or MRD: Once a decision is made to partner a

proactive approach to defining requirements may be required.

Partnership contact and process

o Identification of partners matching criteria

Data Partnerships needed might exceed 10,000’s

Product Partnerships may be 1-2 firms

o Development of a ‘score sheet’ based on MRD to allow internal evaluations to be

successful and consistent

o Management of all documents and IP in a secure fashion

o Financial analysis of impact (cost / revenue)

o Legal implications (based on other partnerships and or other considerations)

o Final proposal to GSM management

Onboarding

o Negotiation of partnership terms and commitments

o Manage queue with development and or support external development

2 skills: Project Management and in some cases SME (subject matter expertise)

o Manage timelines for development, qa, testing

o Validate functional releases

o Manage fist pitches until partner capability is at V3 level capability

o Create documentation for Sales

o Develop marketing collateral (the ‘why’ we partnered and the ‘value’ to our clients

o Create ppt and sales materials (qualification questions, ppt slide, sales process)

o Educate sales / presales on the capability

o Roll out to Sales organization

o Develop connectivity through

Legal

Services

Support

Metropolis

Call in support

Sales

o Define and implement Finance related policies and procedures.

Ongoing Management

o Develop ongoing plan for future enhancements

o Work with partners (roughly 15% per year require upgrades, changes and or contractual

renegotiation

Project Partnerships Project: Background, Vision, and Principals

o Based on changes / alterations – revisit the onboarding process

o Ongoing contractual management

o Ongoing revenue management

o Asses health vs. cost and rapidly adjust

What is the future of partnerships? Achieving scale with partnerships and increasing margin at a faster rate requires development of a scalable self-service model. This includes the full lifecycle from sales to go live. To facilitate this the Partner team will work closely with sales, services and development to build and deploy a client level self-services partnership program based on a simple sign up process and exposing key components that will allow our partners (and larger clients) to be successful. Instead of out of the box functionality, these institutions will utilize our tools to develop capability based on

Information services

REST API’s

Developers toolkits

Automated QA / Testing capabilities

In this case the partner team will:

Monitor partner activity

Support sales in communications between XXX and the partner (leads, product

questions etc.)

Help qualify and encourage, discourage various potential partners from participating

Assist development with qualification of the partners and monetization / revenue share

on these capabilities

Time and assist in the release of partner capabi lity via a ‘marketplace’

This final model will be extremely relevant to numerous high value partnerships. These could include:

Model provision (UMA style capability between XXX non / XXX clients

Alternatives data content and provisioning

Content within XXX direct (externally created tiles, widgets and capability)

Ability to embed our capability in other systems

Monetization models for all of the above will need to be created likely by category of partnership and line of business served where XXX can provide a substantial distribution channel.