ABSTRACT
Regardless of whether one company wins the entire project from beginning to end or wins individual parts of the solution, there are various personnel who will have potential influence over the third-party products and services that will ultimately make up the solution. If the management consultant is employed at a pure play management or business consultancy, this person probably owns the client relationship also. Technical consultancies and systems integrators will look to differentiate themselves from their market competition by their technical insight and know-how, and therefore will encourage close relationships with technology companies so that they can have access to early releases of the software and, in some cases, privileged access to the source code through developer programmes and user groups. Operational benefits are particularly relevant for large information technology services companies who like to act as resellers on large projects. Technology companies have well developed and extensive partner programmes.
