Signing up partners is easy. Building effective partnerships is another story. I have spent the last 20 years working on different software partnering structures. Between HP, BroadVision, Salesforce.com and SuccessFactors, I have learned a lot about what it takes to create a great partnership. I am now working on a new startup with some old cronies from Salesforce.com, called Okta. Okta is chartered to help companies that are using multiple SaaS applications to better adopt, access, and manage their cloud environments. Given Okta’s ability to automate both single sign-on and user management across all of these applications, it sits smack in the middle of Cloud and on premise applications. For Okta, partnering is not only important to our success, it is an imperative. As we build out our partner programs, I am reminded about some lessons that I have learned specific to SaaS partnering that I want to share: