E-Alliances: Search and Match for Small Business Partnership

Companies across all sectors with increasingly smaller size rely on alliance relationships to bolster revenues during times of economic uncertainty. When forming alliances, large firms typically hire vendors such as investment banks to help identify potential alliance partners. However, small businesses with intention to build alliance find difficulties to search desired partners especially on a global arena due to three causes: 1) lack of skills, resources and information; 2) too small to capture the attention of investment banks or alike; 3) not affordable to the high search fee charged by vendors. Thus, reliable information about small business market is often limited. The odds of successful search and match become very low given their limited access to right information. In fact, traditionally labor-intensive search and match either by investment banks or by firms themselves have been both costly and time-consuming. On the demand side, small businesses are searching for more alliance opportunities than ever before while deal size has been increasingly declining since the last two decades. The globalizing, deregulation and internet are attributed to the driving forces of this trend. Under this circumstances, E-Alliances is able to close the huge gap between the demand side which represents the tremendous alliance search needs of small businesses worldwide and the supply side which is constrained by search capacity. In this paper, the author will interpret how E-Alliances is able to help worldwide small business companies to reach their desired partners in a fast, cheap and DIY manner. The author will also discuss the outlook of alliance.