Business partnerships are valuable anywhere, but in Asia, wherelong-term relationships are revered, who you know very much affectshow far you'll go. Singapore's IDA has developed a partnership modeldesigned to help multinational companies gain a toehold in Asia andgive homegrown companies an entry into the globalmarketplace.

The Infocomm Local Industry Upgrading Programme (iLIUP, pronouncedlike eye loop) is the cumbersome name of this program, an initiativethat tries to pair local entrepreneurs in joint ventures withmultinational companies. The objective: to blend the technology,know-how, and sales and global marketing power of the multinationalcompanies with the man power, entrepreneurial energy and local marketknowledge of the homegrown enterprises. Since iLIUP started in 1995,roughly 160 Singaporean companies have been assisted by 20multinational mentors (17 of them from the United States) includingApple, Compaq, IBMIBM and OracleOracle. Alles zu IBM auf CIO.de Alles zu Oracle auf CIO.de

Among the current participants in iLIUP are Sun Microsystems andiGine, an up-and-coming Singapore-based vendor of e-commerce software.For more than a year, Sun and iGine have been united in a partnershipthat serves both companies' business needs. The first fruit of therelationship is WeB2Biz, a new e-business engine developed by iGinefor Sun's partners and customers. According to Philips Lai, strategicbusiness development director for Sun's global sales organization,WeB2Biz has helped cut Sun's order-processing time from 12 minutes to15 seconds. And by leveraging Singapore's state-of-the-art telecominfrastructure, Sun has been able to test new Java and wirelessproducts that can't yet be deployed in most of the world. "[Thispartnership] gives us access to new markets, new technologies and newofferings," Lai says.

But there's a bigger picture here. Clearly, for a company like iGine,a partnership with a brand name like Sun is aonce-in-a-business-lifetime opportunity to take its show out ofSingapore and mount it on the world stage. For Sun, iGine presents ared-carpeted chance to establish an intimate relationship with ahomegrown Asian company that in turn can give Sun the credibility,experience and references it needs to penetrate the entireAsia-Pacific marketplace.

"Doing business in Asia is not easy," says Chang Huong Tan, CEO ofiGine. "The opportunity is here, but if you don't get into the rightrelationships, [market penetration] can't work at all. And theserelationships can take years to develop."