Strategic Alliance Magazine Q2 2017 - 43

MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

partners, and third-party products. It includes a community of over 300,000 developers, 8,000 classrooms
worldwide, more than 10,000 supported hardware
devices, and more 1,000 alliance partners that have
expertise in the NI platform and provide integration
services and consulting.
"Since its beginning, the program has attracted a worldwide selection of industry, application, and domain experts
who extend the capabilities of NI hardware and software
and provide complete solutions for our customers. What
began as a small group of software consultants and system
integrators grew to include add-on product developers,

and has now evolved to over 1,000 partner companies in
70 countries," explained Penny Wright, NI's senior marketing communications manager for the NI Alliance Partner
Network. "Additionally, our third-party software app store
has more than 500 high-quality, compatible products providing extensibility and functionality to the NI platform."
There have been challenges, however.
"Eventually, we did reach a turning point, shifted our
strategic focus, and focused back on the partner relationships. This also meant looking at disparate and antiquated
governance, policies, systems, communications, and management," Wright said. "It became unmanageable ... not
because of the number of partnerships but rather because
the systems and operations staff were not in place."
Given the increased magnitude and scope of its partnerships and community involvement, NI implemented
a third-party tool that manages partner contracts, integrates workflows with sales and operations, and feeds
data to NI's customer-facing directory (see http://
ni.com/findapartner).

"Our company's focus
around partnerships
now permeates all
facets of our
business strategy."
- Penny Wright, senior marketing
communications manager, National Instruments
Alliance Partner Network

"Our team's responsibility over the past five years has been
to implement a tool that has been vital to our success in
developing structure, efficiencies, internal education, and
external awareness, with the goal of reviving our existing
partnerships to drive demand generation and channel revenue," Wright says. "The reorganization of our business
alignment, governance, program marketing, and customer-facing directory over the last five years has by far been
the most successful initiative. Thus, our company's focus
around partnerships now permeates all facets of our business strategy."
Automating these processes has created efficient communication tools to allow for timely responses and has
significantly reduced resource time, according to Armando Valim, global director of the Alliance Partner Network.
"Migrating our 600 partners at the time into the new system provided the momentum to attract even more partner
companies than before without a formal recruiting effort.
Today, we collaborate with our sales sponsors to onboard
new partners in the regions."
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Q2 * 2017 | STRATEGIC ALLIANCE MAGAZINE
http://ni.com/findapartner http://ni.com/findapartner
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Strategic Alliance Magazine Q2 2017
