Maidsfield Blog - Partnering and 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.”

I thoroughly enjoyed Jerry Kennelly’s talk last night at the it@Cork Summer Event in Murphy’s Brewery.

In StockByte, Jerry established a clear vision and opportunity early on and went after it fabulously and whole heartily with great success. That is $135M worth of success when Jerry sold his companies last year.

With the vision at the very start and quickly establishing that they were ahead of the market, Stockbyte established themselves as market leaders and acted accordingly. StockByte were innovative on business model, marketing, delivery of their offering and collecting feedback from the market.

I really really liked:
1) how they marketed the ‘personality’ of the business to set them apart.
2) the constant objective to drive more streamlined scaleable business across the entire business
3) the fast response feedback loop to generate new product directions
4) the focus on high quality, high value and premium service at a relevant high margin price
5) the fast pace
6) the fun of it all, constant innovation coupled with constant business growth, there’s nothing better!

Well done Jerry.

This story and how Jerry delivers it should be bottled and used by Enterprise Ireland as one potential model in building an international successful business. BUT it’s definitely a lesson that it’s well achievable with the right mindset to start with.

I’m going back to work.

also see great write-up on the event at http://www.waveson.com/itcork-and-jerry-kennelly/trackback/

University College Cork operates a successful and highly appreciated Executive MBA Programme. In order to ensure the product continues to meet market needs, Donagh Kiernan of Maidsfield was engaged to facilitate a review.

The review involved facilitating a number of Focus Groups and reviewing the target candidate student (Ideal Client).

The Focus Groups consisted of Industry Leaders, Human Resource Directors, UCC MBA Graduates, UCC MBA Board, UCC Administration and Lecturing Staff took place over two month period in August/September ?¢‚ǨÀú05.

The review report was produced and presented to the MBA Management Board for discussion and review.