Want Your Enterprise to Move Quickly? Grab a Partner!
October 21, 2015 • Blog Post • By Ritika Puri, NewsCred
IN THIS ARTICLE
- Hack Partners provides "hacking as a service" to large enterprises, connecting them in strategic partnerships with developers in order to explore new markets, evaluate new data points and test new technologies
- Through these partnerships, large companies gain data analytics and insights, and developers gain access to large amounts of information from which they can build new technologies
How Hack Partners connects large tech companies with startups to solve big business problems
One of the biggest challenges that large, established tech companies face is the ability to take risks and move quickly. With shareholders to appease and other stakeholders around the world, these organizations often struggle to deviate from the status quo.
That's where strategic partnerships come in. Why not join forces with a rising startup to explore new markets, evaluate new data points and test new technologies? Young companies come to the table with fresh perspectives, agility and flexibility, while established companies can provide the resources and scale that startups need.
Enter Hack Partners, a "hackathon services" company that helps large enterprises connect with the innovative capabilities of the developer community.
"People in the developer community care about making an impact", says River Tamoor Baig, Hack Partners co-founder. "They don't care about making the next Snapchat or Instagram. They're more focused on the actual difference their products make in peoples livelihoods."
It's this rationale that powers Hack Partners' hackathon-as-a-service business model. River and his teams are continuously matching minds between sectors and organizations large and small.
"We work with companies who have terabytes and petabytes of data, but they have no idea how to utilize it. What we've been doing is slowly opening up that data to our developer communities so they can tinker with it and use it to build new technologies. What's happened as a result is that the companies see the added value of these partnerships and have begun investing in the products that our community has built."
This approach, according to River, helps big companies diversify their risk, investing capital in a portfolio that consists of several product ideas. If at least one project succeeds, the investment will have been worth it.
"One of our developer teams built a solution for a national train provider in just 48 hours", says River. "They're now going to replace a tool that the company originally had, which cost them $1.2 million, with this new one, which is more efficient and easier for customers to use."
This level of collaboration is a step-by-step process that takes time to cultivate. As a result, partnership and experimentation opportunities must be ongoing, allowing the developers to tackle new challenges.
"Over time, big companies see patterns among the projects that come to fruition", says River. "It's a perspective that could never happen from putting your eggs into one basket."
By taking a niche and focused approach, the developer community is positioned to solve big problems without boardroom politics or end-of-year forecasts getting in their way. Enterprises can partner with developers at early stage companies to explore emerging technologies and enter new markets faster.