CRN asks what are the influential trends partners need to know in 2023?
SoftwareONE, Content+Cloud, Sophos, Sectigo and more give their views on what channel trends partners need to jump on now to stay ahead
Managed services displacing traditional resale and continued demand for a consumption model were highlighted as key partner trends to be aware of in 2023.
Last year told the story of the channel learning to adapt to the changes made when the Covid-19 pandemic rewrote the playbook overnight.
Hybrid work, which was expected to be a temporary precaution, has now firmly found its place in the business strategies of companies seeking to capitalise on the new opportunities it presents.
While partners that were hesitant on going ‘all-in' with the cloud dived head-first into selling both public and private cloud services.
But now it's a new year, and with these trends continuing to evolve and permeate throughout the tech industry, partners need to be in the know on what's fresh and influencing the channel in 2023.
To learn more, CRN asked a variety of resellers and vendors for their top picks on what trends and business decisions channel partners need to start making sooner rather than later.
Although the subject didn't emerge in these particular conversations, CRN believes environmentally sustainability is an indispensable element that must not be forgotten.
Analyst house Gartner said improved ESG reporting will lead to better access to capital, stock performance, and customer loyalty, a basic necessity several leading partners highlighted to CRN as one of the most common ways partners are making sustainability work.
Kevin Weiss, CEO, Sectigo - "Focus on the delivery of services around solutions"
"Far be it for me to counsel the partners on what they should do. But the thing that I would think, if they haven't done it, and I think in many cases they're being forced to, is focus on the delivery of services around the solutions that they're bringing to market.
"In many cases, those services they deliver are more profitable than the products that they're reselling.
"The notion that Microsoft is saying, ‘we're not going to give you any margin on our products because you're making all the money on the implementation of these products in the customers environments' is a classic case of needing to be in the services game.
"A lot of these partners are recognising that they need to be in managed services, and many of them now are looking to migrate even further up the stack to a managed security services partner to be able to deliver those high value services for the customer."
Read on to hear from SoftwareOne, Content+Cloud, Sophos and more...
CRN asks what are the influential trends partners need to know in 2023?
SoftwareONE, Content+Cloud, Sophos, Sectigo and more give their views on what channel trends partners need to jump on now to stay ahead
Una Keeshan, Federation Leader for the UK, Ireland, South Africa & Nordics, SoftwareONE - "The opportunity is that transformational drive"
"I've seen the demand for customers to drive and to land the transformation objectives that the business has.
"looking at what are the business outcomes that the business wants to drive? What can they do differently? How do they reach that endpoint? How do they work with partners like ourselves?
"From the conversations I'm having with customers it's very much that view of how can we be more efficient as a business, more agile? How can we look at the business processes we have in place? How can we automate, digitise? How can we work with partners that can provide that end to end breath?
"For me the opportunity is that transformational drive that's there amongst our clients right now and also there is obviously uncertainty in the market now that people aren't thinking ahead of what can we do differently? How can we save money? How can we be more efficient? So I see that as a big opportunity for us as we move forward."
CRN asks what are the influential trends partners need to know in 2023?
SoftwareONE, Content+Cloud, Sophos, Sectigo and more give their views on what channel trends partners need to jump on now to stay ahead
Geoff Kneen, CEO of Content+Cloud - "There's still a decent part of the market to move to the cloud"
"Whether or not it drove huge top line growth around data, but I think if we were to look at it and say ‘we're on the cloud, so now what?'
"There's still a decent part of the market to move to the cloud, but there's also lots of clients that have got the cloud, got the data in one place, providing an improved experience to their users. But what do they do next?
"Which application should they be looking at from a SaaS model? What should they be providing from infrastructure as a service to their organisation?
"So I think there's still a need for a cloud strategy, and that strategy shouldn't just be about moving to the cloud. It should be about how we get business value now we're here.
"If we get things right, I think that's the trend that we need to work with because, ultimately, it's a key enabler in you being able to put the right data governance model in place with your clients, to then use that data to provide much better business intelligence so people can make better decisions.
"And also use that data to incrementally further automate and improve the efficiencies of the way that business runs.
"For me, I think the point would still be around having the right cloud strategy. And that's not just saying, ‘we will move to the cloud.' It's more and more about how are we going to deliver more value? How we're going to deliver more efficiency to our business now that we've got all of our data, all of our processing in one place, and we can actually come up with a much more end to end strategy about how we actually improve the business performance and improve user experience."
CRN asks what are the influential trends partners need to know in 2023?
SoftwareONE, Content+Cloud, Sophos, Sectigo and more give their views on what channel trends partners need to jump on now to stay ahead
Rupert Mills, co-founder and director, Krome Technologies - "People are looking to external providers to take cybersecurity as a service"
"The trend we're seeing is that where perhaps mid-sized IT departments traditionally ran their security in-house they're realising there is a larger and larger challenge around doing that.
"For example, they may not be staffed 24/7 They may not have the tooling in place to do it, or necessarily the expertise will be able to keep that expertise.
"So I think people are more and more outsourcing their cybersecurity elements at the moment.
"I think that sort of thing is a real trend at the moment, with people looking to get that in the same way they've gone to the cloud to manage the server state, that sort of thing. I think people are looking to external providers to take cybersecurity as a service.
"I think that's a really big growth area for people. If they can, if they can put that offering together."
CRN asks what are the influential trends partners need to know in 2023?
SoftwareONE, Content+Cloud, Sophos, Sectigo and more give their views on what channel trends partners need to jump on now to stay ahead
Stephen Garrood, UK Managing Director, CloudBlue - "Everyone basically wants a consumption model"
"For me, there is so much questioning around that consumption model, whether it's Azure, AWS or Google.
"Everyone basically wants a consumption model.
"Having the ability to be very, very flexible with your consumption and therefore bundling and selling is going to differentiate what your customer sees moving down the line.
"Because ultimately, even if you look at a telco or distie, the flow is typically to their reseller, onto their customer.
"So managing those tiers and those stages is really important because everyone wants to add their secret sauce along the way.
"So you need a platform that has the ability to manage the tiering from the big vendors to a reseller to an end customer and maybe somewhere in between, maybe a value added reseller that wants to add their own kind of support package or plan."
CRN asks what are the influential trends partners need to know in 2023?
SoftwareONE, Content+Cloud, Sophos, Sectigo and more give their views on what channel trends partners need to jump on now to stay ahead
Dave Mareels, Director of Product Management, Sophos - "We'll see is more macro trends towards outsourcing, finding partners, to basically plug the gap"
"We see a huge people problem. We've seen the defender talent is widening, the gap is widening.
"If you compare the cybersecurity talent war and then combine that with what's happening in the landscape from a threat standpoint. You couple those two up and you have the perfect storm.
"You have the defender talent battle and then you have a lot of bad stuff happening in the world.
"Those two things mean it's going get complex and harder for the small stretch team to deal with those sorts of threats on a day-to-day basis.
"So I think what you're going to see is more macro trends towards outsourcing, finding partners, to basically plug that gap."
CRN asks what are the influential trends partners need to know in 2023?
SoftwareONE, Content+Cloud, Sophos, Sectigo and more give their views on what channel trends partners need to jump on now to stay ahead
Sergey Chernovolenko, global CEO, Noventiq - "Within cybersecurity a big trend is consultancy"
"Obviously the multi-cloud will grow. We see big investments coming from global cloud providers like Google, AWS and Microsoft, and predominantly they are investing big time in emerging markets.
"The second is cybersecurity because everybody would like to be sure once you're in the cloud, everything is protected.
"And within cybersecurity another big trend is consultancy. Both need to be done.