RESEARCH NOTE · RN-01 · AUGUST 2026
The Partnership Variable
What Gartner’s Cool Vendors do (and don’t) tell us about ecosystem strategy when a company gets acquired.
Paul Cunningham, Managing Director
ACE lens: Community (ecosystem position) · Value Proposition (what acquirers actually pay for)
Duncan Chapple at the Analyst Observatory has coded an outcome for every one of the 256 vendors in his Gartner Cool Vendor dataset: independent, acquired, listed, failed, dormant or no trace at all. Mean time from designation to acquisition is four years, and two in five of the resolved cohort were bought. What the dataset does not explore is how any of these companies went to market through partners and channels.
This note works through the exits and tests three questions the partnerships industry constantly asserts but seldom checks: was the buyer already a partner, is the channel why they bought, and does it raise the price?
Research Note · RN-01
01
A prior commercial tie between acquirer and target shows up in roughly 44% of evidenced software/security exits, an order of magnitude above the typical 3% base rate in unrelated industries.
02
That rate is not evenly spread. Ties cluster in hybrid platform acquirers (SAP, UiPath, Dassault, Databricks). Channel-dominant acquirers (Veeam, Proofpoint, SentinelOne, Check Point) mostly bought strangers.
03
No evidence a prior partnership raises the price paid, and no evidence yet that it raises the odds of being acquired at all, only who ends up buying.
Research reviewed
Duncan Chapple, Analyst Observatory (University of Edinburgh): outcome coding of 256 Gartner Cool Vendor designees; extended 27-deal acquirer/prior-tie/channel dataset.
Bottom line
Prior ties predict who buys you, mainly among hybrid platform acquirers. Not whether you get bought, and not what you’re paid.
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