Industry History
The History of Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Partnerships: From Mainframe Add-ons to Cloud Ecosystems (1969-2025)
What began as an unintended consequence of antitrust regulation in 1969 has become the architectural foundation of today's digital economy, where trillion-dollar ecosystems connect platform providers with thousands of specialized software companies.
Company Case Studies
Dynatrace's Partner Strategy (2005-2025): From Direct Sales to Platform Ecosystem Leadership
How Dynatrace transformed from a direct-sales Austrian monitoring company, through acquisitions and a private equity spin-out, to a $1.7B/year partner-driven platform by treating partners as application builders rather than distributors.
Red Hat's Partner Strategy (1993-2025): The Open Source Partnership Paradox
How Red Hat evolved from selling boxed Linux distributions to a $34B IBM acquisition by solving the open source monetization challenge through strategic coopetition—building profitable partner ecosystems around free software while maintaining neutrality with competitors.
Pure Storage's Partner Strategy (2009-2025): The Channel-First Flash Revolution
How Pure Storage built the first 100% channel-driven data platform, using subscription economics and telemetry-driven partner intelligence to transform resellers from sales channels into extensions of their product platform.
Partner Case Studies
DXC Technology Partner Case Study (2017-2025): The Operator That Owns IP
When Computer Sciences Corporation and Hewlett Packard Enterprise's services division announced their $25 billion reverse Morris trust merger in 2017, industry observers saw it as another consolidation play in a mature market. They were wrong.
