Value Propositions for Partners
Solution engineering helps partners in two ways: it enhances the value of their products or services by making them more relevant to customer business requirements and it reduces the cost of creating customer-specific solutions through the use of more generalized tools.

The following are specific value propositions for partners to work with TrueBaseline to solution engineer a cooperative application component.

1. Vendors today build products in a kind of “atomic” way, one piece at a time. Customers find it increasingly hard to integrate these products into their own business, yet technology companies often don’t address this integration. They have to respond to competitive pressure and market changes by enhancing their own products, and their resources and skill sets are focused on this task.
   
   
2. The value of a product can often be enhanced by adding flexible but peripheral tools, such as the management of error notifications, the routing of business messages, the validation of user rights to access applications, and so on. Often vendors assume specialized vendors at a higher level will provide these tools, but industry consolidation is making many of these tool vendors into competitors.
   
   
3. A generalized object-based approach to building onto a basic product gives a partner a very easy way to customize a product to each customer’s needs without committing significant development resources to supporting every deal and without having a complex set of incompatible product versions to support, one for each major customer.
   
   
4. New products have to integrate into existing practices. Object-based tools can accomplish that integration easily by creating objects that “contain” current applications and resources and policies for managing how the two relate to each other. By managing the objects, you manage the applications and resources.

For the networking space, solution engineering can provide some even more specific benefits.

1. Route selection can be enhanced based on true business metrics, such as wholesale cost, route ROI, business opportunity route cost, and any combination of these and traditional technical metrics.
   
   
2. Service management, operations management, fault correlation, problem management and escalation, multi-vendor management, and multi-vendor provisioning can all be combined in a single product framework.
   
   
3. Resource assurance and application assurance monitoring can be applied to network equipment but also to the servers and systems that create additional service features. This is of key importance in an age where more services are being created through the integration of IP networks and hosted service features.