Former NASCAR champion and current FOX TV race analyst Darrell Waltrip recently coined the phrase “coopetition” to describe when two drivers from opposing teams run nose to tail and use the draft to pull themselves to the front of the pack.

“Coopetition” being the combination of cooperation and competition to ensure a positive result for all involved.

I was reminded of the phrase during last week’s DocTrain West conference in Vancouver when during a panel on blogging The Content Wrangler himself, Scott Abel, said that they way for top blogs to build traffic is to build a strong cooperative relationship with other blogs that might be perceived as competition.

The more I thought about “coopetition” the more I realized that is didn’t only apply to the content industry blogsphere, but also to the various content solution vendors. Looking back at last week I probably spent as much time talking with other solution vendors as I did with prospects and customers. The conversations were all friendly, cordial and above all driven by a need to solve our customers’ business problems, not just the specific problems addressed by our own solutions, but all aspects of the content creation and publishing process.

Here at WebWorks we already have established partnerships with several companies who provide complementary solutions that work along side our ePublisher Platform. We are now engaged in even more conversations like that and hope to be announcing more partnerships over the next few months.

I guess “coopetition” isn’t just for race cars – it also works for software companies.