New online partner community Partnerpedia launches 18 August, 2008 By Erin Bell

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Three years in development, Partnerpedia is similar to business networking social media sites like LinkedIn but is specially geared towards small and medium-sized companies that want to create a partner portal but don't have the resources or capabilities to develop one on their own, as well as enterprise-level companies that want to use Web 2.0 to market their programs to a broader partner community.

The three main features of Partnerpedia are a portal that allows users to find and recruit partners through an online community, the ability for members to provide targeted content through a secure Web portal, and the ability for members to collaborate through a best practices wiki.

"All of these three elements have the feedback loops and make use of the unbiased and unregulated Web 2.0 model, which we recognize is a little avant-garde in the channel space, but it something that we think is emerging," said Jeff Chop, CEO of Constructive.

Companies who sign up for Partnerpedia have the ability to create and personalize their partner profile, upload documents and publish articles, rate and comment on other users' content, collaborate on documents and work on specific projects with other Partnerpedia members.

"It's really overwhelming the amount of content partners have to wade through to find the nugget they need when they need it, so the core basis of all of our solutions is personalizing and targeting content to specific communities of partners," said Chop.

Another important feature of Partnerpedia is that it makes it easier for partners to approach each other about business opportunities  for example, it allows one partner to easily search for and approach another partner capable of filling in a service or technology gap in their service offering in order to present a more complete solution to the customer.

"The more partners companies have, the more potential there is for networking and for deal flow between them," said Chop. "End customers don't want piece parts -- they want solutions. And more and more a partner is required to essentially preassemble, come back to the customer with a more complete solution to a big problem, so that might cross a lot of boundaries in terms of new technology that needs to be brought to bear."

Chop continued: "We're happy to allow partners to come across different ecosystems, for example an SAP partner meeting an Oracle partner. We really don't care as long as the end customer is getting satisfied that their systems all work together and they're getting the most ROI out of their investment."

According to Geoff Mair, President of Constructive, emerging technology organizations have to be niche focused as well as being able to offer a full range of solutions in order to compete.

"Partnerpedia allows smaller companies to band together to receive the sales, marketing and services benefits usually enjoyed by the big players," said Mair. "At the same time, it also allows large technology organizations to leverage these dynamics with their smaller partners, so that they too can enjoy increased revenue and partner satisfaction."

Partnerpedia is currently free for basic users, with an optional fee for power users who want more features like the ability to upload more files. There is also an enterprise option for companies that want their own private branded version of Partnerpedia.

Partnerpedia plans to grow its membership through viral and online marketing activities. The network is initially aimed at the North America market with plans to expand worldwide.