Alice Chambers |
Business success is often the result of a strong partnership. For Miryana Tashkova, strategic alliances manager at Tiger Surveillance, collaborating with other technology companies is critical to its ability to safeguard copious amounts of extremely sensitive data.
“We have the responsibility of ensuring surveillance footage is protected, from video capture to ‘end of life’, and stored in the right place,” says Tashkova. “Surveillance video must be available for use in investigations, incident resolution and for deriving insights that inform and improve an organisation’s physical security strategy, implementation plan and efficiency.”
These responsibilities can be fulfilled more effectively with strategic partnerships, such as that of Tiger Surveillance and Microsoft, which brings together experts from fields such as video management, network devices, access control, data and storage.
“Our work with Microsoft has solved the challenge of long-term surveillance storage by seamlessly coupling Tiger Surveillance’s video management system applications with Azure,” explains Tashkova. “Over the years, we have been able to drive forward hybrid cloud adoption in a generally cautious, highly regulated market such as video surveillance by demonstrating the value of cloud storage and services for customers by way of cost and resource optimisation, flexibility and data resilience.
“Thanks to our partnership, CCTV deployments across various industries such as education, law enforcement and transportation, now benefit from a seamless hybrid environment where surveillance data is protected, compliant and accessible.
“Sharing resources, knowledge, technological prowess and funding can open up new opportunities for businesses, increase agility, help identify roadblocks to innovation and spark novel approaches to industry challenges.”
Choosing the right partner
Partnerships have more chance of success if there is a mutual commitment to customer value. Tashkova stresses the importance of aligning in terms of technology design and solution ethos. For instance, Tiger Surveillance values collaboration and open-platform mindsets in partners, as well as simplicity and innovation in technology delivery.
“Ultimately, vendors should strive to enable the best outcome for their customers and ensure this evolves over time as needs change,” she says. “Designing solutions in the ecosystem is a great way to achieve this.
“We appreciate partners who have an open-platform mindset and welcome partner initiatives. We also focus on partnerships where simplicity of technology delivery as well as innovation are shared values engrained in company culture. Whichever the case, discovering where an alignment in approach lies is a major factor.”
Tashkova recommends establishing clear shared goals, fostering trust and rapport, and continuously seeking feedback.
“Successful partnerships often proactively keep up to date with each other’s strategic visions and continuously evaluate and improve their joint solutions,” she says.
Finally, to measure partnership success, Tashkova points to customer satisfaction as the primary indicator, alongside adoption rates and year-over-year growth. Additionally, partner satisfaction and engagement across all company levels and individual interactions are crucial metrics to consider.
“A partnership cannot be effective if steps are not taken to increase partner satisfaction across the board at the company level as well as at the human-to-human level,” says Tashkova.
This article was originally published in the Spring 2024 issue of Technology Record. To get future issues delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for a free subscription.