Sowing the seeds of partnership

Every successful working business relationship relies on trust, co-operation and a pooling of either resources or expertise. Not all these relationships are guaranteed to be a success, but when the elements gel together well, they can prove to be particularly effective and mutually beneficial. Datron Technology has been in such a working relationship with Oxford Technical Solutions (OxTS) for over 10 years now, and the relationship continues to go from strength to strength. So, what makes this working partnership such a success? What were the mutual advantages and benefits that the two companies identified, and how does the relationship work in practice? We managed to catch up with Brendan Watts, Director of OxTS earlier this week and asked him for his opinions on the matter. In the first of this two part interview, Brendan discusses how the relationship first began and how it functions in practice, and in part two he talks about how he sees the relationship developing in the coming months and years.

OxTS designs and manufactures world leading products, by combining the best of Inertial Navigation and GPS/GNSS. Its focus is on low-cost INS, using MEMS gyros and precision accelerometers. It uses Kalman filters to extract the maximum information from GPS to deliver high accuracy measurements with low drift rates. They are a small company dedicated to designing simple to use products that deliver reliable results and back it up with first class service and support. The working relationship with Datron Technology began after a chance meeting at an exhibition in 2001. Both Datron and OxTS were relatively small companies at the time and both were looking to consolidate their respective positions in the market place. OxTS was looking to expand its product range into the automotive market and was looking for sales partners, as they preferred not to deal directly with end users. Datron had extensive experience of the automotive industry and was already dealing with the type of customer that OxTS wanted to target. The rest, like they say, is history.

Can you remember that first meeting?
"I think we met at an exhibition some time ago, but I'm ashamed to say I can't exactly remember when. Datron were making a product at the time which, whilst it wasn't a direct competitor to ours, was used by the same type of people. I think John (Grist) would agree that our product did a lot more than Datron's did, so they were of the view that we were competition. I guess John was interested in us because of that. We were of the opinion that Datron's expertise and extensive knowledge of the automotive industry could prove to be very useful to us. "

"I can't exactly remember how the working relationship initially got started, and by that I mean who made the first move. We were trying to sell our product to the UK and because there were only 2 or 3 of us at the time, we didn't really have the numbers to devote one of us solely to sales. It occurred to me that it was going to be better to sell through people who had experience in this market place, and new all the major players in the sector. We started distributing with John and Datron around about the same time as we started selling through a lot of our other international distributors. It made sense to sub-contract the sales process to outside distributors, rather than have our own dedicated sales people at OxTS. If we'd gone down the other road, we might've finished up with just one sales person dealing with the whole of the UK, and we would have therefore missed out on Datron's experience and in depth knowledge of the market. Besides, we couldn't have a dedicated salesperson for the French market because he couldn't be flying off every time a customer, or prospective customer, wanted to discuss issues with him. So, we followed John's advice and negotiated individual distribution and sales deals in different countries. We're certainly glad we followed this advice, and are really grateful. I guess in essence, John saw our product as being useful to his customers, and we recognised that John and Datron were the experts in knowing who these customers were. So it was a mutually beneficial arrangement."

So, how does the relationship work?
"Originally Datron sold just the RT 3000 for us in 2002, but since then we've added the RT2000, RT 4000 and the Inertial + system. The UK actually proved to be a difficult place to market to initially, a bit of a tough nut as it were, more so than other areas of Europe. But Datron went out and promoted it to people in the UK and interest and sales started to pick up. The advantage of using a company like Datron is that it has an exemplary reputation, and that generates interest and enthusiasm."

"We work together as a unified team: both sides of the business complement each other. We view Datron as being the sale's arm of OxTS. We do the marketing, and when we get any enquiries we then pass them on to Datron. From Datron's point of view I think the relationship with OxTS has helped them to get a foothold in markets they might previously have been unable to. It's the same in other territories we deal with, and works in precisely the same way. We ask that Datron, and the other companies we partner, go round their respective countries and attend exhibitions to promote OxTS products. They'll do the demonstrations at these exhibitions, and we'll provide whatever help might be necessary. Datron have their own demo equipment, but can borrow any other equipment they might need."