Strategic alliances have developed from an option to a necessity in many markets and industries. Variation in markets and requirements leads to an increasing use of strategic alliances. It is of essential importance to integrate strategic alliance management into the overall corporate strategy to advance products and services, enter new markets and leverage technology and Research & Development. Nowadays, global companies have many alliances on inland markets as well as global partnerships, sometimes even with competitors, which leads to challenges such as keeping up competition or protecting own interests while managing the alliance. So nowadays managing an alliance focuses on leveraging the differences to create value for the customer, dealing with internal challenges, managing daily competition of the alliance with competitors and Risk Management which has become a company-wide concern. The percentage of revenues for the top 1000 U.S. public corporations generated by strategic alliances increased from 3-6% in the 1990s to 40% in 2010, which shows the fast changing necessity to align in partnerships. The number of equity-based alliances has dramatically increased in the last couple of years, whereas the number of acquisitions has decreased by 65% since the year 2000. For a statistically examination over 3000 announced alliances in the USA have been reviewed in the years 1997 to 1997 and results showed that only 25% of these alliances were equity based. In the years 2000 to 2002 this percentage increased up to 62% equity-based alliances among 2500 newly formed alliances.
