与巨人共舞

    联合品牌：我们在市场推广中使用的产品名称是：思科网络管家，“基于Opsware公司的自动化技术”。

    不计渠道的奖励政策：Opsware为鼓励公司的销售人员支持思科销售团队（而不是与其竞争），思科公司在Opsware销售人员负责的区域内每做成一笔生意，我们就给予本公司销售人员一定的奖励。虽然这个政策花掉我们不少真金白银，但这样做合情合理。因为思科每销售一次产品，就为我们开启了一扇大门，我们将有机会销售规模更大、利润率更高的产品。

    预防收购措施：我们承诺在签署出售公司的合约时提前告知思科公司，并给予其竞标的机会（如果他们想收购的话）。请注意这项条款跟优先购买权（Right of First Refusal）截然不同。

    源代码许可：我们给了思科一个为期3年的许可证，允许其查看我们的源代码，并在此基础上开发衍生产品，但同时提出了一个创新许可证制度，这项制度不仅给予我们充分的保护，甚至给我们带来了数百万美元的额外收入。不管我们采取了什么行动，我们都认定思科方面永远不会滥用源代码，事实证明了我们的正确。

歌利亚兑现诺言

    合作开始后的9个月内，思科公司先后与敦豪速递（DHL）、好事多（Costco）、斯普林特 （Sprint）、澳洲电讯（Telstra）等公司及美国邮政管理局（USPS）达成了大宗销售合约。没过多久，思科公司的销量就足以超越向Opsware公司所做的季度最低销售额保证。源自思科方面的销量很快就占据了我们公司订货量的25%以上。思科公司巨大的分销能力让NAS软件的竞争对手消失得无影无踪。同样重要的是，每销售一款NAS软件就为我们提供了一个机会，使我们得以向以前从未接触过的客户推销SAS软件，进而为具有高利润率的服务器软件业务提供了强大的推动力。

    当然，在合作的过程中，我们也面临许多挑战。思科的员工在销售产品时需要接受我们大量的培训和支持。双方偶尔因某些客户而产生争执，最后不得不诉诸于仲裁程序。我们每周都要跟思科公司举行一次专门的会议，追踪、推动他们的销售活动，指引我们后续的服务器软件销售工作。我们不得不确定思科方面提出的产品变化和漏洞修补要求的优先次序，融入我们自己的路线图之中。

    然而，我们能够泰然自若地处理这些要求，因为我们有专门的销售和产品管理人员来应对这些问题，而有保证的庞大收入流也让整个公司意识到，这是一个值得配合的协议。

    Co-branding: The product was marketed as Cisco Network Compliance Manager, "built on Opsware automation technology".

    Channel-neutral compensation: To motivate Opsware's sales people to support their Cisco sales counterparts instead of competing with them, we compensated them for every Cisco sale in their territory. While this cost us real money, it made sense because every Cisco sale opened the door for us to sell a much bigger, higher-margin product.

    Acquisition insurance: We committed to give Cisco advance notification of any agreement to sell the company, and the opportunity to enter the bidding if they wanted to. (Note this is very different from a Right of First Refusal.)

    Source code license: We gave Cisco a three-year license to view our source code and build on it, but came up with an innovative licensing approach that protected us fully and even generated millions in additional revenue. In any case, we bet they would never actually do anything with the code, and we were right.

Goliath delivers…

    Within nine months, Cisco was selling large network software deals into accounts like DHL, Costco, Sprint, USPS and Telstra, and a short time later, they were selling enough to exceed the quarterly minimum revenue guarantee to Opsware. The Cisco deal would go on to generate over 25% of our bookings. Cisco's massive distribution power vaporized our NAS competitors. Just as important, every NAS sale opened the door for our SAS product in accounts we had never penetrated before, providing a major thrust to our high-margin server business.

    Of course, there were many challenges along the way. Cisco people needed lots of training and support to sell the product. There were occasional conflicts over accounts that had to be arbitrated. We ran a separate weekly pipeline call with Cisco to track and drive their sales and direct our follow-on server sales calls. Product change and bug fix requests from Cisco had to be triaged and folded into our roadmap.

    However, we were able to handle these demands with equanimity, because we had a couple of dedicated heads in sales and product management to handle them, and a large guaranteed revenue stream that helped the whole company to realize this was a deal worth supporting.