All partners have different types of shareholders, ranging from stock-listed companies like NTT Docomo to private investors as in the Middle East to familyowned businesses as in France. The size of the companies varies as well: Getronics and Compucom are large companies, while in Spain, China and France the partners have just over 1000 employees. Each of the seven alliance partners have different field service partners in their region, together covering 35 countries and 80 % of the global economy.
The alliance is structured with one contract, and there is no legal entity. The CEOs of the partner companies meet twice a year to discuss strategic issues, while a more operational steering committee meets every two months. Every partner dedicates some employees to the alliance, which adds up to around ten sales persons and one marketeer. In addition, in July 2009 Ivan Vogels was appointed as alliance director, responsible for the further growth and promotion of the alliance.
Ivan explains:“ One of the first tasks was to position the alliance as a separate entity and as an alternative for our large competitors. Apart from the ongoing business wins, one of our first successes was that the alliance was mentioned in the Magic Quadrant of Gartner. This is one of the leading market intelligence agencies in our industry. Furthermore, some basic things had to be arranged such as a website and marketing materials.”
Whereas Getronics has a customer intimacy strategy, the alliance has more of a product leadership strategy. Ivan:“ We strongly focus on providing IT workspace solutions, otherwise our attention gets scattered. There are not many companies with a worldwide offering like ours, and this enables us to offer unique functionality.”
In a commercial process there is always a prime contractor, and that is the partner in whose area the head office of the client is located. There are a few pricing principles to prevent uncompetitive as result of the partnership structure. These are:
� �
�
There is no margin stacking, every partner only makes a profit on his own contribution; Every party bears all risks associated with his scope of work, these risks are not forwarded to the prime contractor. The only exception is when turnover for a subcontractor is very low. Only the prime contractor can include costs for overall project management, for the rest he only takes profit on his own activities and own risks.
The prime contractor will conclude an outsourcing agreement with the client. Between the partners there is a reciprocal general service partner agreement, supplemented with further client-specific agreements.
As Getronics holds minority shares in all the partners, it has an inherent interest to do business with these companies. This does not apply the other way around, but here the exclusivity of the partnership is arranged through the alliance agreement. Ivan Vogels:“ Equity swaps could be an interesting tool, especially with new partners, but it currently does not have the highest priority. My first aim is to let the smaller partners grow to a more substantial size, so that the alliance is more balanced.”
The various partners particularly need to be stimulated to focus their sales efforts on international rather than local business. This needs to be achieved by incentive schemes. At the moment these schemes are based on the turnover in the respective countries
42