Vendor Partnerships Mean Added Functionality

Market dynamics often mean good news for users when it comes to technology products, especially when competition drives prices down, but there are other dynamics that work to your benefit; for instance, when vendors partner to deliver more features and services to round out their offerings.

The market for compliance-related software and services is still young, and you've probably heard me warn here before not to expect these products to meet all your requirements. Not to say that all compliance applications are one-trick ponies, but most are designed to accomplish specific compliance tasks, like archiving, or monitoring, or reporting.

Acknowledging this, vendors are starting to partner up in the exploding compliance market and looking to each other to add value to their respective products. And that's good news, indeed. With the continuing hot market, vendors are realising two things: Companies that buy technology to assist compliance efforts often have other needs that the product being purchased does not address; and that their can be natural synergies between products from different vendors. Nothing new among technology vendors but it is the sign of a healthy and growing market.How healthy? Garnter predicts that IT financial-compliance management spending will increase to between 10 percent and 15 percent of IT budgets this year, up from less than 5 percent in 2005.

So how are these partnering manifesting in benefits for compliance initiatives? It will take many forms, but we're already seeing storage vendors like EMC and ONStor hook up with software developers with programs that make it easier to archive, search and locate the data for auditing or legal purposes.

With technology spending for compliance growing in leaps and bounds, IT departments are going to be spending a lot of time evaluating products. And perhaps we can be of some assistance.

As you examine technology products and services, make sure to check out Compliance Pipeline's new Product Finder, a great tool for efficient searches for compliance tools and services by category.