What is a Strategic Technology Partnership?

If you spend any amount of time around members of the Tech Soft 3D team, you will have heard the phrase “Strategic Technology Partnerships” and we thought it could be useful for us to explain what this phrase means to us and how it benefits you.

The concept of building “Strategic Technology Partnerships” encapsulates our approach to business and this philosophy permeates every decision we make and action we take.

The best way to fully understand our approach is to break it down by the three words themselves: Strategic, Technology, and Partnership”.

Strategic: 

In almost all cases, the CEO or senior management are involved in making the choice of who to partner with; because it’s an important decision with long-term impacts on the success of their business. Choosing the right partner can mean faster time-to-market, a more competitive product, efficient use of scarce development resources, and flexibility as product needs evolve. 

Choosing the wrong partner can have the opposite impacts; slower time-to-market, a less competitive product, inefficient use of development resources, and less flexibility as needs evolve. That’s what makes the decision a strategic one. We always want our partners to look back and say, “The decision to partner with Tech Soft 3D was one of the key reasons we’ve been successful”.

Technology:

All of our partnerships are built around the technology we provide, how that technology evolves, and how robustly it’s supported. We know that the technology is the core of our partnership and what our 700+ partners count on us for – both to address their needs today and to serve their needs tomorrow. They also look to us to be able to solve as many of their development challenges as possible, which is what has driven us to develop the most comprehensive set of components in the industry.

When a partner comes to us with new requirements or with a new project, we want to be able to say that we have technology that can help them. In addition, we keep abreast of all relevant technologies so that we can also recommend the right technologies to our partners, whether those come from our portfolio or elsewhere.

Partnerships: 

This concept truly pervades everything we do and all of our business relationships are built in a spirit of partnership. Inside and outside of Tech Soft 3D, we don’t refer to ‘customers’ because the companies we work with are more than that; they are our partners. This is reflected in our titles (Partner Development Manager rather than Sales), Partner Engagement (rather than Marketing), Partner Success (rather than Support), etc. 

It’s also a core concept behind our business model – which aligns our interests with our partners because, in any real partnership, both parties are striving to succeed together. So, we root for the success of our partners and we try to help them in whatever ways we can. 

Most importantly, we provide our partners with the best technology and help them use it optimally, but the concept extends beyond the technology to include things like co-marketing, introductions to potential business partners, recruiting, finding investors, and helping them stay informed about evolving technologies and trends.

A Real-World STP Example:

Perhaps the best way to bring this Strategic Technology Partner approach to life is with one of our many real-world examples, SolidWorks. We often say that we measure the success of our partnerships not in fiscal quarters or even years – but in decades and SolidWorks is one such example.

We began working with SolidWorks nearly 25 years ago. At the time, the SolidWorks team was looking to provide their users with an easy way to share their SolidWorks designs for collaboration. Their answer was to develop a product called ‘eDrawings’, which is both a lightweight streaming format and a rich 2D/3D viewer.

Our long-term partnership began with our tools being used to accelerate their development of a desktop viewer and also create their unique file format. eDrawings was a major success, so over time, they wanted to port the viewer to mobile platforms. Because we often talked with them about longer-term roadmaps, we were ready with new platform support that has continued to grow over time.

The next stage in our partnership was to help Solidworks deliver web-based visualization for helping users publish SolidWorks models to the web using our newly developed web tools.  Later, as the eDrawings team wanted to add AR capabilities to eDrawings, they leveraged our research there. Down the road, when SolidWorks wanted to develop a specific Model-Based Design module, they relied on us again for our expertise and 3D publishing capabilities.

The summary is that as the 3D needs of SolidWorks evolved, our approach meant that they had a strategic partner they could depend on again and again.

You can read more case studies and get in touch with us below: