When does multi-vendor collaboration become commercial value, rather than a joint press release?

A press release announces the partnership. What determines whether anything happens beyond the launch is the operating mechanism underneath it, and too often alliances optimise for the announcement. The differentiated few optimise for the second and third deal. That shift in what you are designing for changes everything that follows.

I have spent twenty years working across technology alliances and have watched organisations with complementary technologies and customers produce brilliant programs and solutions but then struggle to build up a business. The capability was never the problem. The mechanism was.

One lesson I’ve learned has taught me more about how to change that outcome than any other. It sounds almost too basic to matter but in practice it has been the single most consistent gamechanger I’ve seen deliver results:

Ask the customer for a testimonial at the beginning. Do not wait until the solution is built and delivered. Start with the end in mind.

When a collaboration starts with the end in mind, it is designed backwards from the customer outcome, rather than forwards from the assets each partner would like to contribute.

Partners do not share the same appetite for risk

Before the mechanism can work, there is something less comfortable to name: the parties around the table rarely share the same appetite for risk, and assuming they do is how collaborations stall.

In my experience the participants tend to fall into recognisable archetypes. The strategy and advisory firms will shape a bold customer ambition but often want a proven reference before they attach their name to the delivery. The large platform and technology vendors can invest ahead of proof, because often the knowledge developed will have wider reach and value, and can be re-purposed across different customers over time. The specialist and boutique delivery partners carry the most immediate delivery risk relative to their size. These partners feel every week of an extended enterprise sales cycle. And the customer is weighing reputational risk of a different kind.

Here is where the opening lesson earns its place: the testimonial commitment secured at the beginning, will usually unlock the risk sequencing. When a customer agrees to advocate for an outcome they have defined, partners have the confidence and the reference point they need to commit.

None of these positions is wrong. They are rational responses to each organisation’s economics. When I am leading a multi-vendor collaboration, my aim is not to flatten those differences, but to sequence the commitments so that each party is asked to risk what it can bear, when it can bear it, all pointed at the same outcome. Reconciling different risk appetites is not a distraction from the mechanism. It is the mechanism.

Starting with the end in mind

There is often surprising nervousness about the up-front customer conversation. Teams worry that asking a customer to commit any level of advocacy before the solution exists is premature. My experience has been the opposite.

When I explain to a customer that a testimonial will be requested, and that their advocacy is a qualification prerequisite to enter a program, I have never met resistance. The reason is simple: I am not asking the customer to endorse an outcome that has not happened yet. I am asking an investigative question, to understand what success needs to look like.

“What would need to be true for you to stand on a stage at the end of this build and talk about the solution: how it solved an important business problem, created measurable value, and left you excited about what comes next?”

That question does more than secure a future testimonial. It enables and sharpens the collaboration itself. It lets the parties work out which levers and strengths each will contribute, all pointed at an outcome the customer has already defined as worth talking about. It pivots the engagement towards customer success, instead of starting with the technology each party brings and then hunting for evidence that it mattered.

“They asked for a faster audit. What they really wanted was accelerated time to value.”

Consider a mid-market manufacturer pursuing a clear business goal: accelerated time to value, expressed as a 40% reduction in its annual audit timeline. Modernising the finance data behind that audit was only the enabler. The outcome came from four contributions, and no single party could have delivered it alone:

• Customer: owned the problem and set the 40% target.
• Cloud provider: AI services (document processing, automated reconciliation, a gen-AI assistant for auditors) that did the audit work.
• ERP vendor: clean, governed source data to ground the AI.
• Delivery partner: built the solution, tuned it to the customer’s controls, and aimed it at the outcome.

Orchestrated around one shared KPI: a partnership of equals, not four separate deliverables.

Note: this case study has been anonymised and is presented for illustrative purposes only.

The technical work was never the point. The goal was 40% faster time to value.

Program mechanics, mechanisms and input KPIs still matter. Leaders, program owners and contributors need to know whether milestones are being met, whether the right organisations are making the contributions they promised, and whether the KPIs themselves need adjusting. But it’s important to avoid mistaking activity for outcomes.

The ultimate measure of success is whether the customer believes enough value has been created that they are prepared to put their reputation behind saying so. That is a far higher bar than completing a proof of concept.

Collaboration creates differentiation not by adding more technology, but by combining assets that would be difficult for any one participant, or competitor, to reproduce alone.

Every scenario is a different recipe

There is no single template. Each scenario needs its own set of ingredients: the second engagement is unlikely to be an exact replica of the first, and even where the consortium parties are the same, the considerations differ.

Each vendor and each customer start with different levels of maturity and market recognition. A first-time partner needs more scaffolding than one that has delivered together before. A category-leading vendor carries recognition that a challenger has to earn. And the same solution lands differently by industry, by geography and by culture: what counts as a credible proof point in one sector reassures no one in another; what reads as confident directness in one market reads as pushy in another; the pace, the formality and even the meaning of a public testimonial vary across cultures.

Treating each scenario as its own recipe, being genuinely industry, geography and culturally aware, and adapting the mechanism to fit, is not softness. It is what drives commercial success scenario by scenario. The mechanism stays constant; the seasoning changes every time.

If multi-vendor collaboration makes so much commercial sense, why is it so often hard to create meaningful commercial value?

Let me acknowledge it is hard. Bringing disparate teams from different companies together takes time to establish processes and ways of working, and everyone naturally wants fast validation that the effort is paying off. We look for short-term evidence: a completed proof of concept, a first customer deployment, revenue, or the launch of a repeatable offer.

Those measures matter, but a launch is the start of a long process, not the finish. Partners need to warm up the market, build enablement, submit and approve solution nominations, iterate through development, and finally deploy. Meanwhile the program teams are building combined go-to-market plans, running workshops and webinars, and reporting progress back to leadership. Everyone who knows the SAP ecosystem, knows the weight of enterprise sales cycles. Multi-party collaboration extends that timeline further; it rarely compresses it.

The wider value comes through an invisible arc: the follow-on opportunities, the wider references, the deeper customer relationships, the greater seller confidence. It builds over time and rarely arrives inside a neat reporting period. The first deployment may be modest, but the value that follows can be considerably larger, accumulating across opportunities that were not visible when the original program was approved. This is why optimising for the announcement is a trap and optimising for the second and third deal is the discipline that separates the successes from the weekly noise.

Pressure to demonstrate short-term impact can push organisations to undervalue that longer arc, the part that makes collaboration commercially significant. The challenge is not to measure the initial outcome. It is to recognise and track ecosystem and customer trust, and the subsequent collaboration it unlocks.

This matters because multi-vendor collaboration is not difficult merely because its benefits take time to appear. It is difficult because the organisations involved must also turn an initial customer outcome into something repeatable.

And why, when everyone around the table believes they are fully committed, does everyone also quietly suspect they are contributing more than the others?

I have learned that success takes far more than complementary capabilities and good intent. It takes grit, and a determination to call out what is working and, more importantly, what is not. It takes a willingness to have uncomfortable conversations about contribution, ownership, investment and commercial return. It asks partners to put time, expertise and sometimes reputation behind something before its value has been proven. And, like many relationships, each participant is often convinced they are carrying the greater share of the load.

Those tensions are not evidence that a partnership is failing. They are part of making it work. This is not primarily an innovation challenge. It is an alliance challenge, where teams come together to deliver something none of them could achieve in isolation.

Successful multi-vendor collaboration is a commercial design and an execution challenge.

The objective is not to make organisations contribute equally. Their contributions are rarely equal, or even directly comparable. One brings technology, another customer access, another industry expertise, intellectual property, investment, data or delivery capability. The objective is to combine those assets around a defined customer problem in a way that creates something none of the participants, or their competitors, could credibly reproduce alone.

The consortium must then turn that combination into a repeatable offer, make it easy to take to market, and demonstrate an outcome customers value enough to support, buy and recommend.

I believe it is a relatively simple equation:

Commercial co-innovation = differentiated capability + defined customer problem + repeatable offer + frictionless route to market + measurable customer outcome.

The equation is simple. The execution is not. Which is exactly why I open every solution nomination, and every project that expects to deliver multi-party success, with that same customer question.

The answer is defined by the customer, and it becomes the team’s north star.

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Zoe Tomkins is Global SAP Partner Development Leader at Amazon Web Services (AWS). She writes on sapperment in a personal capacity; views are her own. Articles are vendor- and firm-neutral.

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