And we expect to hear more of them. So should you, now that we've started Corporate Dealmaker Forum, a stupefyingly logical extension of the magazine we've been publishing for more than two years now. Maybe you'll even feel like chiming in yourself.

The logic goes like this: When our parent company, The Deal LLC, started looking for an additional way to serve the corporate audience, and especially corporate development types, we soon settled on the idea of a magazine with a reader-service, sharing-best-practices approach.

This was because interviews with numerous corporate dealmakers had made three things obvious:

a) Corporate dealmakers range across a wide intellectual territory, from the many parts of their own companies, to the industries they work in, to adjacent industries, to specialized fields like law, licensing and a little accounting here and there. There's a lot you need to know.

b) Corporate dealmakers do much of their learning through experience--and through sharing experiences and insights.

c) Since the jobs can be lonely, interchanges with other people who know the ropes are not just useful but also fun and affirming.

Now, there are some great meetings for corporate dealmakers out there--the Conference Board Strategic Alliances Conference, for example. But for a gathering with some scale and span and staying power there is, of course, nothing like the Web.

So here we are with our new CD Forum. Think of it as a running commentary on anything and everything helpful to corporate dealmakers, provided by our journalists, aided and abetted and often outshone by dealmakers and an occasional expert or two. We hope you like it. — Kenneth Klee

The 2006 Strategic Alliances Conference

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