Partner marketing for startups gets specialized, integrated

Partner marketing for startups: Exploring niches

Silverthread, an Innovation Showcase participant based in Cambridge, works with technology solutions providers, consultants and systems integrators. The company's CodeMRI software product line analyzes large codebases to support software modernization and identify defects.

Partners license Silverthread's products for use in their software assessment services. Daniel Sturtevant, the company's founder, pointed to the example of Black Duck Software, a solutions provider based in Burlington, Mass. Black Duck uses Silverthread's technology in its software auditing practice for M&A due diligence. Black Duck's software audits examine a customer's license compliance, software security and code quality.

Consultancies, meanwhile, license Silverthread's software for use in software modernization projects and also tap its personnel as second-line tech support on large engagements, Sturtevant noted.

In another nod to specialization, iCustomer, which presented its namesake go-to-market (GTM) operations software at the Innovation Showcase, recently launched an initiative to tap marketing agencies to penetrate the SMB market. Within that segment, it works with marketing operations agencies and GTM operations agencies, said Abhi Yadav, CEO and co-founder at iCustomer, which has offices in San Francisco and Cambridge.

The company offers its agency partners a prepackaged data audit, which they can conduct for customers to spark a consulting engagement. The audit is designed to reveal a customer's "data readiness" and where they need to improve their data foundation for effective marketing campaigns, Yadav noted.

He said the idea is to "give the playbook to people who are already closer to the customer and who the customer trusts."

Pursuing account access, software integration

Partnering helps early-stage companies gain access to enterprise customers that would be difficult and time-consuming to reach on their own. 

Aperio, a startup that featured its DataWise data quality software at the Innovation Showcase, works with a couple of service provider partners. The Boston-based company focuses on industrial time series data, which streams from sensors attached to equipment in power utilities, oil and gas companies and other enterprises.

Such industrials sometimes retain service providers to serve as their data custodians. That status has led Aperio to collaborate with Accenture and Radix.

There's a whole ecosystem within industrials. We're all starting to work together.

"We partner with them, and they use our tool to find anomalies in the data," said Jane Arnold, Aperio's customer success lead.

In turn, Aperio benefits from the partners' customer relationships.

"We have a faster path to get into an account because it's easier to come in through an existing vendor," CEO Jonas Hellgren said.

However, Aperio is somewhat ambivalent about the services model. Arnold said that services can prove very expensive for customers, noting that Aperio isn't sure whether it will continue that aspect of partnering.

On the other hand, the company plans to proceed with its technical partnerships. Those deals aim to integrate Aperio's software into other tools customers already use to manage time series data. The company, for example, works with Seeq, which provides analytics software for time series data, and it's finalizing a technical partnership with Aveva, an industrial software company. Aveva, meanwhile, inked an alliance last year with Seeq to integrate their respective software platforms.

"There's a whole ecosystem within industrials," Arnold said. "We're all starting to work together."

"We're working to technically integrate ourselves into those workflows," Hellgren added, pointing to the opportunity to add Aperio's capabilities to the software industrial customers already use.

Yadav said iCustomer also aims to augment existing platforms at customers, citing integration partnerships with cloud data platforms such as Databricks and Snowflake.

"Our go-to-market is within the data platform, piggybacking on Databricks and Snowflake and building [the iCustomer software] as an application on top of that," Yadav said.

Gaining new IT insights from startups

When IT service and technology providers team with early-stage companies, the traditional benefit has been the ability to introduce clients to promising technologies.

John Spens, vice president of data modernization at Thoughtworks, a technology consultancy based in Chicago, said his company partners with startups but is careful in doing so. Spens participated in a data management panel discussion at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium and attended the Innovation Showcase participants' presentations.

"We apply a layer of conservatism to this," Spens said. Technologies that look good on paper might prove inadequate in a large enterprise, he cautioned.

"Bringing these technologies on, you have to be very judicious about it and think about [whether] they are ready to scale and address the level of complexity," Spens said.

The greatest value in listening to startups is their knack for questioning conventional technology wisdom, he added. "So many times, I hear these presenters refute existing mindsets. They challenge the norms."

John Moore is a writer for Informa TechTarget covering the CIO role, economic trends and the IT services industry.