Bringing clarity to partner ecosystems

Technology vendors have built remarkably rich partner programs. Each one — with its own tiers, badges, competencies, and specializations — is a carefully designed, authoritative signal of what a partner can genuinely do within that vendor's world. Building programs that rigorous is the hard part, and the vendors have already done it.

Earning a place in those programs is real work, too. Behind every competency or specialization is a partner that has trained its people, passed certifications, and delivered the kind of work a vendor is willing to stand behind. Those credentials are hard-won, and they say something true about a firm's expertise — Partnerindex exists in large part to make that investment visible.

What hasn't existed is a way to see across them. A firm that works on several platforms earns credentials in each, expressed in each program's own language. Partnerindex brings those signals together — taking what partner programs already publish and resolving it into one comparable, vendor-neutral view of who does what, where, and how deeply, across the ecosystem as a whole.

The index is built on a set of vendor partner programs we treat as grounding — the authoritative source of truth from which everything else is derived. We count only what a vendor has itself verified, because those are the signals worth trusting: a partner's standing rests on credentials the vendor has formally granted, not on self-reported claims or unverified listings.

Today that set covers the major data and cloud platforms — AWS, Microsoft (Azure), Google Cloud, Snowflake, and Databricks — and it is deliberately growing. Each program we add sharpens the picture: a partner appears once, with its credentials from every program it belongs to merged into a single profile, so you see the whole footprint rather than disconnected slices of it.

The Partnerindex measures coverage: the share of the combined, published capability catalogs that a partner demonstrably holds — competencies, specializations, and validated services, drawn from every grounding program. It is deliberately hard to saturate. A high score means a partner holds more of the catalog than its peers — not that the catalog is complete, and not a measure of revenue or size. Because every credential it counts had to be earned, a high score reflects genuine, sustained investment in capability.

Per-vendor standing applies the same coverage definition scoped to a single vendor's catalog. Capability, industry, and role profiles group a partner's distinct verified credentials by what they attest to, and the geographic view places each partner by where it is headquartered. Everything is recomputed with each data refresh.

By default, the leaderboard lists every partner by its Partnerindex, highest first, on a 0–100 scale. Because the index rewards coverage rather than size, a focused specialist can rank above a far larger firm.

Apply a filter and the ranking recomputes for that slice. Narrow to a single vendor and partners are ordered by that vendor's own coverage; narrow to a service line or industry and they are ordered by the verified credentials they hold there; narrow to a place and they are ranked within it.

This is an experiment, and an evolving one. The set of grounding vendors, the way capabilities are mapped, and the weighting behind the scores will keep changing as the picture sharpens — more programs are on the way. None of it is settled, and that is intentional.

If you see something that looks wrong, or have an idea for how the index could be more useful — a vendor to add, a capability to map differently, a question it should answer — I'd genuinely like to hear it. Get in touch.