Powered by Max Banner Ads 

I’ve been a long time Amtrak rider since moving to the burbs north of San Francisco seven years ago. I must admit that I hate driving and prefer to be driven. It would be great if I could own a limousine and hire a chauffeur, but alas, I’m limited to public transportation or driving my own car.

The problem with Amtrak and generally most public transportation is that they don’t really cater to their customers. The information alliances that they’ve built with partners are zero to none. For example, how often have you jumped on Amtrak, say from Sacramento, and got to your final destination in San Francisco, without missing some type of connection? An information alliance / business development effort with the San Francisco public transit system could solve this problem in a heartbeat.

I remember one day leaving San Francisco Fisherman’s Wharf on Amtrak and arriving in Richmond, CA only to have missed my connecting BART service by 52 seconds. Yes, that’s how long it took to get from the Amtrak track to the BART track … down one set of stairs … up another. Again, an information alliance, an exchange of data … bits … would have helped me to make my connection.

The problem, I’ve been told, is that each transit authority is only responsible for their little fiefdom. Forget about customer service. Let’s just get our trains there on time … our time, that is. An information alliance with other transit authorities does not help individual company’s “on time” schedules, but it would help us, “the customer.”

I recently read an article about the slippage of Amtrak train ridership on the Capitol Corridor route. The story was written up in the Davis Enterprise. The article states that while ridership is down this year, on-time arrivals are at an all-time high. It doesn’t take a brain scientist to see how easy that is to accomplish … ridership DOWN … on-time arrivals UP?

Amtrak, like so many other public transportation systems should consider themselves as being in the “people moving business”, as Jeff Jarvis would say, NOT in the train business. By building information alliances with BART, the San Francisco Muni, AC Transit, CalTrain, and countless other transportation companies, we all might take public transportation more often. And, after all, isn’t that what we all want for a greener America?

Here’s another information alliance that can be exploited. What if when you arrived at your final destination a rented bike rack was waiting at your disposal? Or, what if a Zipcar or heaven forbid, even another public transit system that was timed to meet up with a “foreign” transit system?

There is no easy answer to this problem. But, there is no way out without an answer. In other words, we have the ability to build information alliances and data exchange. Someone has to start this business development effort in order to change the “drive my car” mentality in California.

It’s outrageous to hear companies like Amtrak boast about on-time arrivals when the real end-to-end experience for the customer is what’s really lacking. An information alliance / exchange of data and a tad bit of planning would really enhance the experience for the customer. It might even perhaps raise ridership because customers would feel confident in getting to their final destination hassle free and timely, if not “on time.”

Read more articles from David Chan.

 Powered by Max Banner Ads 

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.

Read more articles from David Chan

 Powered by Max Banner Ads 

Alliances are relationships created between companies to achieve an agreed upon goal. The goal could be to penetrate a country or industry together. It could also be to drive a new product line that was jointly developed. Or, the goal could simply be to complement each other in areas where the other is not as strong.

There are many reasons to develop alliances with other companies. The net result of developing an alliance is to pool resources. This is especially critical if you’re a small company with monetary or geographic limitations. For example, for a small startup company in Silicon Valley, your workforce might be limited to a handful of people and you also might be on a very tight budget. But, your product line might hold great possibilities to be sold in an emerging country, such as Vietnam or Cambodia.

In this example, a company may decide to enter an emerging company by selecting an alliance company that has what they lack. For example, language and geographic presence are obvious reasons to create an alliance. Other reasons could include a large, well-trained work force and rolodex of clients in your prime target area.

Just as importantly, though, is whether the alliance partner can train and support the clients in this geographic region. In fact, this is probably the most important aspect which needs to be addressed up front. While working for Oracle in Asia Pacific, I was tasked to find the build the right alliances in the multiple countries which we served. The upshot of finding strong alliance partners with both training and support expertise is that we spent less time supporting them directly, which translates into less direct costs.

A small company benefits from working with a larger company by leveraging the brand and market reach of the larger company. Using the same example above, Oracle developed alliances with hundreds, if not thousands of small companies, often in the area of systems integration work. The small systems integration company benefitted through association with a brand name like Oracle and the marketing prowess for which Oracle was known.

Strategic alliances are also very important to the success of a small company. Back in early 2000, I was at a hot, but small mobile startup company, called Everypath. At the time we only had 20 employees. Who would want to work with such a puny company? As VP of Biz Dev, I was tasked with signing up strategic partners. Strategic was the key word. Which companies out there would find our technology so compelling that they would build a business practice around our technology.

We proceeded to sign up some of the most prestigious companies, including Accenture, Cap Gemini Ernst and Young, Sun Microsystems, and Hewlett Packard. Not only did these alliances align strategically with us, we also received $20 million in venture capital and financing. This influx of strategic partners was the impetus to drive our company to next level of fund raising to the tune of $100 million. These same alliance partners also worked to drive market awareness and clients for this little 20 person company.

As you can see, alliances can be the catalyst that jumpstarts a company’s market awareness and revenue, if positioned strategically.

Read more articles from David Chan

Read more articles from David Chan