Frequently Asked Questions
- Immediate Opportunity
- Long Term Potential
- Value
- Capabilities
- Sharing Products & Services
- Procuring Products & Services
- General Membership
- Developing Partnerships
- Financial Detail
- Operational Detail
The Alliance is an interconnected global network of members from the Americas, APAC, and EMEA regions. Members fit into the Alliance by not just geography but also through their core competencies of products and services. Members are selected based upon their geographic location, capabilities, and their creditability/reputation.
In short, we hold various planning meetings to help you get started. The Alliance has a simple two-phase process for new members to get involved which includes a partnership with CAI. Overall, value is delivered through a force multiplier of opportunities, products, and routes to market that are provided to, as well as received by, Alliance members. More specifically at the onset, we promote implementing a product/service bundle with the support of CAI to begin value realization.
The Alliance will publish monthly progress and growth updates which include detailed reports of the activity in the Alliance as well as the growth in membership. Companies will also be encouraged to create their own “Alliance communications” for the possible distribution to Alliance members. It is important to track and manage one’s own Alliance value program.
There is no committed access to CAI’s customer base or any other Alliance member’s customer base. Access to membership customers is up to the individual members and the value proposition brought forward for consumption. When establishing a new partnership between members, the relationship is structured to allow each member to decide the amount of access to its own customer base. This is a critical protection of the Alliance.
As in any business opportunity, honestly implementing the Alliance agreement and the principles of operation is an assumed part of the business relationship. Alliance members are expected to follow the membership agreement when developing new partnerships. Any firms who violate the bounds of the agreement will be removed from the Alliance and lose access to any products/services, introductions, and future opportunities. Although there is no explicit guarantee of multiple transactions with any specific member or set of members, integrity protection within the Alliance is always sought out first, of which we believe will lead to repeat business for all. The Alliance ensures the quality and integrity of each individual member upon entering the Alliance. Transparency, reliability, and integrity are three staples of the Alliance, and all members are expected to uphold those values. Once a partner relationship is made, it is up to the members to ensure relationships succeed.
Each agreement between members is structured by those two new partners. Each member opportunity should be structured with the proper protections in place for both sides if it does not go as planned. The Alliance does not provide individual protection between members. The result will be the same as if the members with any issue, were in an arrangement outside of the Alliance. The dispute, if any, and the success of each opportunity is managed between partners/members.
The Alliance provides continual value through access to bundles of products and services provided by its members. The Alliance facilitates an online interaction portal for members to promote themselves, register and fulfill opportunities, and contact other members. As Alliance membership grows, members gain access to a continual and growing inventory of products, services, and channel relationships.
Yes, the Alliance provides a platform for sharing an opportunity with all members. The website provides a mechanism for submitting new opportunities and requests for partnership and the Member Interaction Port facilitates single, narrow, and broadcast methods for soliciting and provisioning opportunity between members.
a. Your success in the Alliance depends on what you put into it. The more partnerships you create and opportunities you register, the more value you will receive. Long term success can be realized in numerous ways and each member will realize success differently based upon their strategic goals for growth and expansion. For example, one member may realize long term success with an increasingly large and geographically distributed customer base whereas another member might realize long term success through an expanded or improved offering suite augmented by the R&D of other members. The possibilities and combinations magnify as membership grows.
The Alliance provides an online interaction portal available only to its members. The portal allows each member to promote itself, register opportunities, and find new partners thus making it easier to expand their business. The portal is accessible 24/7 with communication capabilities built in. In addition, the Alliance is establishing itself as an entity and brand that can assist in market perception and credibility for its members.
Although the Alliance is not a sales force promoting the products and services of any specific member, the Alliance facilitates the communication and opportunities between members. Each partnership between members should ensure that sales effort is maximized on their specific opportunities in play. The Alliance provides an organized and succinct conduit between members so they can find and close new opportunities.
CAI promotes the Alliance to help its members expand their capabilities far beyond current capabilities. CAI benefits when Alliance members benefit and in direct proportion. When membership gains, CAI benefits. Many firms are faced with similar limitations to growth and CAI wants to create a mechanism for overcoming those limitations and reaching new heights. Our goal is to create a platform for firms to expand their business globally.
The Alliance provides a nearly cost-free method to experience new opportunities through marketing, channel development, partnerships, and more. The Alliance provides all members with immediate access to products and services to augment their current capabilities. The Alliance also provides warm introductions to prospective partners and customers (though those partners) as well as a continuous pipeline of potential new opportunities through an ever-expanding membership. The overall benefit is time and effort savings by leveraging the Alliance’s products and services as well as improved ability to secure new opportunities through the Alliance’s network.
Every business is challenged by the cost of sales, distribution, geographic support, and leverage. Each company is also challenged by the cost of building out dozens of required capabilities that are readily available in the Alliance. Value is realized through the combination of reduced sales cost, increased distribution capability, improved geographic support, and enhanced leverage of accessing an abundance of available product and services with no R&D expense.
Value realization metrics are defined with each individual partnership. The Alliance tracks various metrics to ensure overall value towards the collective strategic goals. Each individual member is responsible for defining its metrics for value realization. The alliance will track certain metrics including number of opportunities created, number of registered opportunities, wins, losses, and variants of these by each member.
Alliance relationships improve organizational cost structures by reducing or eliminating the R&D necessary to develop a new product or service. This is realized by leveraging the R&D of other members in the Alliance. The cost (in both dollars and effort) to identify and close new customer sales is reduced through warm leads and introductions from members.
Early-stage success is created for all members through the introductory partnership with CAI. This provides a choice of numerous products and services to augment your company’s capabilities through fast-start initiatives. CAI will act as “Partner #1” to help the membership jumpstart their member-to-member experience. The Alliance may also help you identify your first new partnership through a warm introduction facilitated by an Alliance Manager.
The Alliance facilitates best practices through the standard membership agreement and NDA to help ensure each member upholds certain guidelines for action. It is the responsibility of each member to protect its own IP and interests in dealing with members. Every partnership should include explicit IP protection for any products or services included in a new opportunity in the same way a partnership or new customer relationship is protected through each organization’s agreement structure.
The Alliance helps you support existing customers by augmenting your capabilities with the products and services of other members as well as initial bundle offerings. Utilization of the products and service in a membership bundle will help you support and deliver services more effectively to your customers.
Upon initial membership, you will partner with CAI to help implement some or all of the products and service in a selected welcome bundle. The relationship with CAI will directly result in new opportunity potential as we help you create a plan for membership. The Alliance also provides an easy-use online portal for contacting other members and reviewing open opportunities at any time.
Members will be introduced to customers at the discretion of the member who holds the existing relationship with a particular customer. Each partnership is defined and executed by the members involved so each member has the responsibility to choose which members can access their current customer base. Think of the Alliance as an opportunity for potential new channels.
In each partnership, a member that introduces or even resells your product or service is baring the SG&A cost for their sales operations and personnel. You (as the product or service proving member) are either providing a resell discount or paying a referral fee, but in either case you are not hiring or paying salary to the selling member. Therefore, your cost of “sale” is the referral fee as a sales commission.
Another company would want to sell your products because those products can help increase the capabilities of the company. This can result in an enhanced offering suite, expanded reach, increased ability to support customers, and more. Companies will sell your products if those products benefit their organization and their clients. In many cases, products or services are required to complete the solution a client seeks and in these cases the Alliances makes for a tremendous opportunity to create complete packaged offers with competitive differentiation.
Wins and partnership success are tracked through revenue and new opportunities generated by the Alliance as a whole. Through the opportunity registration process, each member will be able to see the status and disposition of a particular registration. Additional success tracking should be executed by each individual member involved in a new deal or opportunity. The criteria for wins and success will be defined at the beginning of each new partnership created.
The Alliance agreement states that all members act in accordance with the bylaws and maintain a high level of integrity and reliability. The Alliance does not police individual relationships between members, but the Alliance does ensure that the quality of members in the Alliance meets a high standard of integrity. Your individual opportunity or relationship should be defined by the arrangement developed between you and that member or customer.
Upon entering a new partnership, members should define their process and relationship that should be used for each item by all parties involved. As with any partnership, it is important to establish the proper foundation for the relationship to realize the best support to promote your product, service, or brand in agreement with your organization’s intentions. Ultimately, your collateral and value proposition will be the main driving forces to ensure your product is correctly positioned by another member. The Alliance helps by facilitating introductions with other members who have been reviewed before joining the consortium.
One of the great values of the Alliance is that the Alliance Network provides massive capability to forge new “Go to Marketing” options. The Alliance itself will not directly sell any members products. The Alliance provides a path for any member to create a very powerful set of indirect channels to promote and sell members’ offerings.
The Alliance website and interaction portal provides a vehicle for sharing your products and services with other members. The process for adding your offerings to website and portal is very simple while simultaneously giving you full control of how much others can see before initiating a conversation directly between members. Each member is provided a “storefront” that is consistent and provides for quick introduction to the member company, products, and value propositions. The interaction portal allows for single, narrow, or broadcast capability for members to engage with other members easily.
No, the initial membership bundle provides access to numerous products and services that are free of charge upon receipt of your membership dues (currently waived). You, as a new member, can select which products and services from the membership bundle you would like to implement. Many of the offerings are free and there are some available at aggressive discounts specific to Alliance members.
CAI, as the Alliance principal, will provide initial recommendations for the use and customization of each of the products in the bundle available to Alliance members. This will assist members to make the best selection for their needs.
The efforts to implement a bundle depend entirely upon the products or services that a new member selects. As with any product selection, some products and services will take more effort on the front-end learning and planning while others are much simpler. Further detail will be sharing when discussing each available offering in the bundle.
Each product or service available in the membership bundle comes packaged with supporting materials (including processes, marketing and sales collateral, implementation plans, use plans, etc.). All details will be discussed upon your selection of product or service to implement as a new member.
With any marketplace type structure, a key to success is allowing the “market” to dictate and have its say in how the opportunity progresses. The Alliance, by design, will ensure limited geographic and category exclusivity, to some degree and as the Alliance grows it will take on the characteristics of the market. For example, if AI software is a leading market demand and there are simply just more AI software vendors and a demand for such, we can expect the Alliance to support and have more of those vendors in proportion to others. The same in specific geos that can support the market need. The Alliance provides each member a standard categorical breakdown to self-categorize. From there, further expansion is planned to avoid any egregious overlap both geographically and categorically.
We spend considerable time creating a relationship with each new member when they are initially joining the Alliance. During this period, we help the member plan and identify their future goals so we can most effectively provide guidance to each member.
The existence of the Alliance is the first and foremost “help” to members. As a consortium for technology organizations, members are helped:
1) access to a vast inventory of products and services without the traditional R&D investment costs,
2) the capability to promote their products and services to other members establishing new opportunities and partnerships, and
3) gaining access to new markets and geographies without the cost of hiring and implementing sales organizations in those territories.
Each new member has a bundle available to them immediately after joining the Alliance. The new member can choose to implement any of the products and services in the bundle we will aid in the proper implementation. We provide an online interaction portal for members to communicate with one another, create partnerships, and find new opportunities.
Yes, we follow a thorough vetting process to ensure the credibility of all new members including such items as: pre-membership reviews, market validation and company stability.
Via the membership interaction portal, members can see activity associated with their communications and registrations with other members pertaining to opportunities. The Alliance will also make available membership updates and tote-board like statistics so that membership can see the progression of the organization.
The Alliance is focusing on emerging to midsized technology firms from across the globe. Software, Devices & Infrastructure, Technology & Business Services, Emerging Technology, and Communications Services firms are the Alliance’s top tier breakout designations. Sub-categories for each are also defined and will be highlighted in onboarding discussions. We want to represent a wide range of technologies including the top programming languages, support methodologies, cloud platforms, enterprise software applications and those services required to represent all the above.
The Alliance does connect and create relationships between members but that is just the beginning. The Alliance provides access to wide array of products and services to increase your capabilities. The Alliance also provides the promise of future opportunity through membership. The three topline benefits from the Alliance are:
1) access to a vast inventory of products and services without the traditional R&D investment costs,
2) the capability to promote their products and services to other members establishing new opportunities and partnerships, and
3) gaining access to new markets and geographies without the cost of hiring and implementing sales organizations in those territories.
The Alliance provides access to selectable bundles of products and services included in membership to immediately augment a member’s capabilities. The Alliance provides an online interaction portal to help you grow your organization and expand internationally at a fraction of the cost to do it internally. The Alliance also provides an instant benefit to members allowing them to increase their market perception appearing as a much larger and connected organization.
The Alliance offers the ability to request a partner or register an opportunity directly through the interaction portal. The interaction portal facilitates single, narrow, and broadcast methods for soliciting and provisioning opportunity between members to establish an easy start to relationship and opportunity building.
Our vision is to create a brand name of international reliability, trust, and integrity that consistently delivers above and beyond expectations. By creating and backing this with the members of the Alliance, we will develop a strong consortium of members that will leverage the collective promise of all. In our launch phase, the Alliance is a consortium between members and not a “consumer marketplace” or “wholesale marketplace” as Amazon and Alibaba are. When the Alliance attains the appropriate scale, our intent is to open the door to a company (consumer) marketplace function adding yet additional value for a direct channel capability on top of the indirect capability of the consortium.
The Alliance is structured so that all members have the opportunity to financially benefit. As the founding organization, CAI is also a member and can receive these similar benefits. Fees collected by the Alliance are used in part to fund the operations, digital presence, communication and recruiting functions for the Alliance.
The Alliance has an annual fee of $12,000 which pays for general membership, access to the interaction portal, and access to implement both the free and paid for products and services in the bundle. Currently, the 1st year fees for membership are waived. For each new partnership created, the Alliance collects 3% of all net new revenue from both companies involved.
Yes, please contact us for more information.
This is a fixed rate membership. Each member pays $12,000 annually plus 3% commission paid to Alliance on all net new business created through Alliance partnerships.
The Alliance does not publish a proforma as public information. We are happy to review our plans and financial goals with members during their evaluation of membership in the Alliance. Please contact us for more information.
The Alliance offers a locked-in annual rate of $12,000, for the initial 5-years of continuous membership for the initial fifty firms to join the Alliance. Currently, the Alliance is waiving the first-year membership fee as an added benefit.
If a member has an existing OEM or business relationship with another member and the member has the market or geographic right to represent that other product or relationship via a 2nd tier distribution model (resell) or referral, that product or relationship would flow through the Alliance as part of the member’s activity. You may incorporate your vendors into new business in the Alliance in the same way you would any other product or service in a partnership Please consult with us for any details.
The details of membership and the rules of engagement will be discussed with you following your interest in joining the Alliance. A Prospectus Brief and Prospectus Detail are available for interested organizations.
The Alliance will provide a logo for use on your website or other media. In addition, a link to your “storefront” page on the Alliance website is also provided so that you can actively promote a perception to your prospects of a stronger and larger international presence with access to products, services, and markets beyond your current capacity. In addition, referred new members (either directly or by completing a form on our Alliance website from your store front) will earn you credits toward annual membership fees. Please contact us for more information.
With any partnership or alliance program, it is always recommended to have personnel associated with the initiative. With the Alliance, a member should have a “go to” person that is the contact point to field opportunities and answer questions or other member inquiries. You may already have a person dedicated to partner/alliance work and this individual would be perfect for the Alliance engagement. Your assigned individual will help manage new relationships developed, help search for new partners, and manage the overall Alliance relationship. We recommend spending a few days to understand the Alliance’s capabilities and points of leverage.
The initial benefit is time and access to products and markets. With an individual search and partnership not associated with the Alliance, you can establish a one-to-one relationship that may succeed or fail depending upon your dedication and resource spent. The Alliance provides a one-to-many capability with an existing group of preliminarily vetted organizations already categorized for easy and quick search ability. The Alliance provide the tools necessary to find, communicate with and register opportunities from a single pane of glass. The Alliance offers speed, volume and like-minded organizations that are already willing to engage companies like yours as they are members in the consortium. The Alliance provides a general stamp of credibility, reliability, and integrity in support of your partnering efforts.