Recent news concerning IT industry strategic alliances increasingly trumpet the word “unique” as in ‘unique alliance’ or ‘unique partnership’. Usually these unique arrangements bring together a marketer (either a system integrator or a service provider) with a solid footprint in a niche market and a technology developer or manufacturer with an innovative or proprietary capability. This type of alliance transfers to the marketer a unique technological edge. The marketer's objective in many such cases is to keep competitors at bay, grow market share or create enough...