If you follow the IT press, you will notice that not a week goes by without tech vendors announcing collaborations, partnerships and alliances. When IT companies collaborate, it often comes under the heading of “better together”.

 Some of the alliances that exist are quite surprising. In this cloud driven era, coopetition is the order of the day. As customers increasingly demand more flexibility and choice, companies that have competing products and visions have no choice but to work with each other. This results in some unexpected bed fellows. Examples would include Red Hat the leading light for OpenStack cloud, working with Microsoft to make Red Hat Enterprise Linux available for Azure. Pure Storage sharing the storage landscape has an alliance with Cohesity and even VMware and Docker talk publicly about how they partner together. 

A question that can legitimately be asked is “Are these alliances just marketing hype?”