Cybersecurity defies direct-sales trend

Cybersecurity cements its status as a channel-first market with more than 90 per cent of spend flowing through partners, as growing complexity and AI adoption strengthens its importance

While vendors take more of their business direct in parts of the IT market, cybersecurity is bucking the trend with customers increasingly reliant on channel partners to deploy, manage and secure increasingly complex environments.

Speaking at an Omdia event in London, chief analyst Matthew Ball said more than 90 per cent of cybersecurity spending is now delivered “to, through and with partners”, making it the most channel-dependent segment of the technology industry.

“Across all of IT, the partner share is around 65 per cent and that’s been falling steadily over the last five years,” Ball said.

“Cybersecurity is actually moving the opposite way. The more complex security gets, the more customers pull in their partners to help.”

Omdia expects the cybersecurity opportunity across EMEA to grow by around 12% this year to almost $100bnn, with services accounting for roughly two-thirds of the market and managed services representing the single biggest opportunity for partners.

Every dollar of cybersecurity technology sold generates more than $2 of associated services, said Ball, with partners continuing to deliver the overwhelming majority of that value.

AI reshapes security services

Ball said AI was accelerating cyber threats while simultaneously changing how organisations consume security services in a couple of ways.

“The first is that AI is going to widen the gap between organisations that are cyber resilient and those that are cyber vulnerable, and it’s going to result in more damaging breaches,” he said.

“The second is that AI is going to force every organisation to really rethink their risk and redesign their defences.”

Rather than reducing the need for partners, AI is creating new opportunities around advisory services, managed detection and response, governance and AI security.

Customers are also consolidating security suppliers around integrated platforms. According to Omdia, 81 per cent of organisations intend to rationalise their security products over the next 12 months as AI increases the need for better telemetry, faster decision-making and greater operational context.

At the same time, cloud marketplaces are becoming a more important procurement route for security, with partners increasingly expected to co-sell alongside hyperscalers and manage larger platform deployments.

Ball said the industry’s value was also shifting: “Customers are moving away from buying point products or just technology. They’re buying outcomes.”

He argued that partners would increasingly differentiate themselves through business knowledge rather than simply deploying technology.

“Agents are going to supply the labour, but partners will supply the context, and that’s where the division of value is going to sit.”

Looking ahead, Ball said cybersecurity partners faced three strategic choices: reselling vendor-built AI services, developing their own AI capabilities on top of vendor platforms, or, for only the largest GSIs, building independent agentic security platforms.

Whichever route they chose, he said the opportunity for the channel is only set to grow.

“Cybersecurity in the age of AI isn’t really just a technology shift. It’s also business decisions. It’s about leadership. It’s about transformation.”