Source: Wikipédia
A business partner is a commercial entity with which another commercial entity has some form of alliance.
This relationship may be a contractual, exclusive bond in which both
entities commit not to ally with third parties. Alternatively, it may be
a very loose arrangement designed largely to impress customers and
competitors with the size of the network the business partners belong
to.
Differentiation
The meaning of the term is quite different from that implied in partnership, and it is because of the potential for confusion between the two that widespread use of 'business partner' has been discouraged at times in the past.
A business partner can be:
A supplier
A customer
A channel intermediary (such as an agent or reseller), or
A vendor of complementary offerings (for example, one party sells the hardware, while the other sells the software)
This is a wider definition than a business alliance.
A Business Partner is becoming more common in HR departments as it represents the employees position, ideally seeing the HR issues from the employers and employees point of view. Small and medium business are often turning to external HR Business Partners to solve any HR disputes.
Cohesion
One example of a business partnership is the "Agility Alliance" originated by Electronic Data Systems.[1] Members of this IT-focused alliance include Microsoft, Oracle Corporation, Sun Microsystems and SAP. This highlights two problems with multi-party partnerships:
Two of the companies may be partners with a third member of the partnership, but highly aggressive towards each other. (Oracle and SAP compete against each other in the ERP market.)
One party may be partner to a second party when targeting one market, but competitive against that same company when targeting another market. (Microsoft may be happy to work with Sun when Sun is offering its servers, but far less happy when Sun is proposing OpenOffice.org, in contention with Microsoft Office.)
Business Partner Search
Business Partner Search or Business Matchmaking is the process/service of finding buyers/customers, distributors, licensees, and/or other business partners. This, as service can be found as a paid service provided by a commercial organization or a free service by the commercial section of a country's embassy/consulate or an association of businesses in a particular area.
Customarily commercial consideration of this service is a one time fee. Fee of this service depends on the business domain, the volume of business of both partners that will end up in a partnership relation as the end result of this service, etc.
In a specific example of a specific domain this fee is found between EUR 1800~2200 depending on the tasks required from the business matchmaker.
