We have seen more disruption in the channel ecosystem over the past 18 months than the industry witnessed in the last two decades. If we look back specifically at 2018, digital transformation was debated all round and channel partners left no stone unturned to capitalise on the opportunities created by the digital technologies.
Last year, the industry also saw cloud, IoT, AI, and automation starting to drive incremental business tech investments. In fact, after a decade of incredible growth, cloud’s TCO is being felt by customers, and the channel is benefiting. As enterprises move to cloud, they will increasingly rely on their channel partners to support cloud integration and expand market share. And instead of betting on a single public cloud service, MSPs must look at offering multi-cloud management across both AWS and Microsoft Azure, and perhaps even Google Cloud Platform.
As we turn our attention to 2019 and beyond, we will see that beyond SaaS integrations, the solution partners will see sizable margin opportunities in the new year around serverless computing, managed containers, managed security, cloud consolidation, hybrid, multi-cloud, edge IoT, open source, and robotic process automation (RPA) as an onramp to AI.
Besides these, partners are also witnessing customer opportunities in augmented/virtual reality, 5G, and 3D printing as near-term, profitable areas that they can pursue in 2019. For example, one of the fastest-growing places in the channel is in RPA, where companies such as UiPath is growing significantly and adding tens of thousands of partners to their ecosystem.
With regards to the partner programs, this year we are also expecting the technology vendors to take more of an ecosystem approach rather than a linear, tiered approach. For instance, through its Elevate Partner Program, CrowdStrike is working with its partners to enable a ‘whole-ecosystem’ approach based on various paths to partner engagement and profitability.
Nivedan Prakash
Senior Associate Editor, CRN India
[email protected]
