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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.

Read more articles from David Chan