Maidsfield Blog - Partnering and Business Development

On Monday December 1st 2008, Cork City, South Cork and West Cork Enterprise Boards, and FÁS together with the Plato Small Business Network will present a four hour workshop/seminar around the four core pillars essential to business survival, “Managing Business in an Uncertain Environment”

Maintaining Equilibrium - Managing Cash - Retaining your Customers - Internal Cost Competitiveness

I am presenting on “Internal Cost Competitiveness”. I have been asked to speak on how technology can help reduce the operating costs in today’s businesses. My focus will be on both technology in the business and real opportunities the Internet is presenting for businesses.

Things are changing all the time, I suggest you question everything in your business:
1) Energy Usage - IT, Lights and Heating - drawing from lessons at this week’s it@cork conference
2) Phone Costs - Landline and Mobile - VoIP / Skype
3) Broadband/Internet costs
4) Travel - Can Video Conferencing help?
5) Software - Google Apps and others
6) Services - What can you outsource (anywhere in the world?)

Donagh Kiernan
Maidsfield Associates
Partnering and Strategic Business Development

I wrote before about partnering with perceived competitors.

Paisley (MN, USA) and QUMAS (Cork, Ireland) are clearly active in the same markets, selling to similar buyers and are side-by-side on the Forrester Wave and the Gartner Magic Quadrant. They are not competitors.

Even in reviewing both company’s products and services, they are clearly providing solutions to solve similar needs. Yet, they are not competitors.

In this partnership, Paisley will embed the QUMAS DocCompliance™ functionality as a feature of Paisley Enterprise GRC™

Paisley and QUMAS fit because:

• Paisley is an industry leading provider of solutions for governance, risk and compliance (GRC) including comprehensive software solutions, training, and expert GRC professional services. Paisley have more than 1,400 large enterprise and mid-market organizations including 30% of the Fortune 500.
• QUMAS is the leader in Enterprise Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) with more than 250 customer deployments and over a decade of experience helping companies in highly regulated industries provide a proactive regulatory defense.
• Paisley have achieved great market penetration into a broad range of sectors.
• QUMAS’ have achieved great success in Life Sciences and Financial Services sectors.

Paisley wins because of expanded capabilities and enhances Paisley’s offerings:

We are excited about the expanded policy management capabilities that the DocCompliance solution will bring and how it will enhance the Paisley Enterprise GRC solution. The addition of this functionality will further support the GRC convergence efforts of our clients and extend the value of our solution to all organizational consumers of compliance information.

- Tim Welu, CEO of Paisley. Click here to read more.

QUMAS wins because of significant distribution channel and expanded visibility in a very broad market:

The QUMAS DocCompliance product offers significant complimentary functionality to Paisley Enterprise GRC. The Paisley relationship also provides a significant distribution channel for our solutions and expanded visibility of the QUMAS solutions in a very broad market.

- Kevin O’Leary, CEO of QUMAS. Click here to read more.

ALSO, QUMAS recently won Irish Software Association Collaboration Award 2008 based on the Paisley partnership. http://www.QUMAS.com/news-events/pr-111108.asp

Stacey and Tim Welu, Paisley	Kevin O’Leary, QUMAS

I compliment the vision of Tim Welu, Kevin O’Leary and their teams in Paisley and QUMAS.

Donagh Kiernan
Maidsfield Associates

“…delivering consulting services in Sales Generating Partnerships and Strategic Business Development …to established globally focussed technology companies.”

September 2008

After two years being CEO with Campbell Informatics, I’m back to pick up Maidsfield Associates. It’s been a great intensive two years with Campbell Informatics with many successes and many more to come. I spent much time building relationships and selling into the US Pharmaceutical market with Campbell Informatics and met many great people. I am continuing to support Cliff Campbell and the Campbell Informatics team as a Director on the Board and an advisor.

Maidsfield’s focus is on assisting globally focussed technology companies with Sales Generating Partnerships and Strategic Business Development support to the CEO.

Thankfully, things have taken a good start with reviving old client relationships and some new ones. I enjoy the constant learning experience and I revel in progressing and developing further and bringing this experience to my clients. In that vein, I was deeply honoured to have been one of the 32 Irish technology entrepreneurs to have been selected to participate in the Enterprise Ireland / Stanford University Leadership 4 Growth Programme over the past year. I learned so much and met so many great people.

In continuing with Maidsfield, I chose the focus of Partnering as it’s an area I had good successes in the past and when finding the right-fit can deliver great value to growing technology companies.

I chose Strategic Business Development supporting the CEO, as I enjoy it and can quickly understand the CEO’s visions and plans in developing their business and assist in their projects

Looking forward to it

Donagh Kiernan
Maidsfield Associates
info@maidsfield.com