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It used to be that when people talked about joint ventures, it meant some convoluted, complex, long drawn out business relationship. Everyone was on their pins and needles waiting for legal contracts to be drawn up, lawyer reviews, back and forth negotiations, concessions here and there. Miraculously, one year later, voila, you have a new joint venture. Three months later, the relationship sours for one reason or another and the partnership falls apart.

Joint ventures, of course, are referred to by many different names, not the least of which includes: partnerships, strategic alliances, alliances, etc. No matter what you call it, joint ventures are designed with the intent to create more value from two or more entities than you would have with only one alone.

In my first year at Oracle, I created a joint venture between several technology companies: Oracle, Novell, Intel, Synoptics, etc. We dubbed the joint venture, TIE for The Integrated Enterprise. At the time, integrating solutions from several different technology providers was a difficult task. On top of that, one had to figure out how to train and support customers and resellers. The goal of this joint venture was to reduce the complexities of implementing cross – company technologies.

At Hewlett Packard, we launched a joint venture between Oracle and Hewlett Packard. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software was blazingly hot and both companies desperately wanted to be in the space. A joint venture relationship was developed, a marketing plan was drafted, a team was assembled, revenue goals were quantified and an execution plan was launched. Both companies benefitted from this collaboration because each leveraged the others core strengths in hardware / professional services and software and support.

Another example of a joint venture in the music industry was when MySpace inked relationships with the big music labels. The result of this venture was to create a new MySpace Music entity where the labels gave streaming and downloading rights to this new entity. The goal of the joint venture is shared advertising revenue, which of course, with 100s of millions of users is an advertiser’s playground.

So, what does the new world of online marketing and profit systems look like? In this new era of Internet and mobile marketing, affiliates rule the playground. The affiliates and, even more so, the super affiliates are the power brokers. Joint ventures are common in this business and move at the speed of, well, the digital network. Those who understand how to work with affiliates will see a multiplicative effect of their marketing dollars.

Joint venture brokers are also gaining in popularity. These are “brokers” who can marry the super affiliates to companies who are looking to jump start their online businesses. This is no trivial pursuit, as it requires, just like in the “offline” world, a strong product, a huge market, a business plan and lots of diplomacy and tact.

Joint ventures can be a great way to accelerate sales, as well as to reduce the complexities of going it alone.

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Business development in this new era of Internet and mobile marketing has changed dramatically since the 90s and even early 2000s. In those really “old” days, companies looking to expand built Alliance divisions and signed distribution agreements with 3rd party partners. These 3rd party partners provided much needed support to the host companies in a variety of ways: geographic reach, consulting services, technical support, and distribution logistics.

The 3rd party services provided a lot of value to the host companies. They allowed the host companies to reduce their costs, while increasing their sales, marketing and business development capacity.

However, back in “the day”, in order to have a successful partner program, the host company needed to spend a lot of time on “set up”. Business development involved a lot of “heavy lifting” in the form of recruitment, training, sales tools, technical support and oftentimes co-selling!

My experience in early day business development came from high tech software and hardware companies. The products that we sold were physical products of software applications, servers, peripherals and other related products.

Fast forward to the digital economy … the value chain of manufacturing, distribution, sales, marketing, support and training has been significantly compressed or dis-intermediated. The Internet, broadband speeds and global sourcing, among other things, have created huge opportunities for business development in practically every industry imaginable.

For example, let’s examine the high tech software industry. In the 90s software was an “on premise” solution. This means that people paid LOTs of money to install a company’s software on their premise, i.e. at their office. The whole company was involved from the sales organization to the consulting group to the support team, etc. Sometimes, a partner was involved to augment the services of the host company.

Today, that same software application is not an on premise solution but now managed at some other facility. The host company’s sales person may have sold you the solution or perhaps a partner telemarketer out of India or the Philippines. And, the support could be coming from yet another third party organization.

Business development then logically evolves into a different kind of animal. Instead of building a huge organization to drive new products and services, companies can source and diversify their team across geography, industry and even niches.

New terms have also evolved to describe the actions and responsibilities of the new online business development frontier. For example, what was once known as a reseller in the offline market is now called an “affiliate”. When an affiliate advertises your product online, it’s often called PPC or Pay per Click campaign. In the old days, it was simply called advertising.

Whatever terms you want to use, the online business development model is the digital wave of TODAY and it is accelerating across all industries. If you’re stuck in web 1.0 and static web pages, be prepared to be “leap-frogged” by the new nimble, fleet-footed Online Marketers.

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