• Application Provider
• Attached OEM
• Direct Marketers
• Embedded OEM
• Independent Hardware Vendor (IHV)
• Independent Software Vendor (ISV)
• Mid-Tier System Integrator
• Network Service Provider (NSP)
• Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM)
• OTP or OEM Technology Provider
• Portal and Web Application Developers
• Registered Reseller
• Service Provider
• Strategic Government Systems Integrator/Government Systems Integrator
• Systems Integrator/Value-Added Integrator (SI/VAI)
• Value-Added Reseller

If you’re making changes or launching a new marketing initiative, you need to think about all your partners and the effects on the channel. For each change. Sometimes seemingly unimportant changes to your product or “premium partners” can piss off your entire ecosystem.

The reason the ecosystem is so delicate is because there are many, many partnering agreements. For example, Oracle touts that they have 20,000 partners. When you have a portfolio of software, and thousands of partnerships, the complexity becomes almost unmanageable. Consequently, there are a lot of economies of scale with software. By having more products and more revenue, you can afford to have an army of partnering-centric employees who keep the ecosystem in balance and prevent disasters.