If you’ve been following recent hardware market reports, you’ve likely seen the headlines: new printer and multi-function printer (MFP) shipments are slowing down. For partners whose businesses have long been tied to the rhythm of the three- to five-year hardware refresh cycle, this might seem like a cause for concern.

But what if this slowdown isn’t a threat, but a massive, hidden opportunity?

We’ve been speaking with our partners across the globe, and a consistent, insightful narrative has emerged, particularly from those in EMEA. They’ve pointed to a “renewal gap” created by the market disruption of 2020. This isn’t just a theory; it’s a reality backed by data.

The pandemic aftershock: Why 2025 is different

To understand the opportunity in front of us, we first need to look back five years. The common perception is that IT spending froze in 2020. That’s only half the story. While strategic projects were paused, they were immediately replaced by a frantic dash to buy technology for one reason: enabling remote work.

As almost all of our partners observed, this led to two very different stories for the hardware market. While the PC market boomed, the office-centric, multi-function device (MFD) market experienced the exact opposite. As your customers’ offices closed, the need for large, centralized printers evaporated overnight.

Partners tell us the same story. They noted that, while home printer sales surged, businesses stopped buying high-end office devices, and many reported that their customers had slashed their budgets.

As predicted by our partners, the consequence of this ‘missing’ cohort of MFDs from 2020 means that fewer devices are coming up for a standard five-year renewal this year. But this isn’t a dead end. It’s a pivot point. The conversation is no longer about hardware replacement; encouragingly, it’s about optimization, security, and solving the challenges of the modern workplace.

Three strategies to win in a slower hardware market

When businesses aren’t buying new hardware, they inevitably look to get more from what they already have. This is where the channel, armed with the right software solutions, can provide real, tangible value beyond the hardware.

First, you need to lead with fleet optimisation, not just replacement. Indeed, the slowdown in new sales is the perfect trigger to switch the conversation. This market shift highlights a critical customer need: a single solution to manage their existing devices while preparing them for the future, whether that’s a move to the cloud or adopting new security standards.

This market trend confirms that this work is critical. It allows you to approach customers with a compelling message: “Holding off on new printers? No problem. Let’s modernize the print experience you already have, making it more secure and easier to manage.” This changes your role from a hardware vendor to a solutions consultant.

This is where the flexibility of independent software vendor (ISV) solutions come into play. As a starting point, an effective print management solution will help to put the right printer onto a user's computer, depending on their location, access rights, job role, and so on. Such solutions enable you to demonstrate how you can add more value to your customers and end users, elevating your role from a software supplier to a trusted advisor and consultant.

Perhaps more importantly, print management solutions simplify the process for securing and managing a customer’s current fleet, while a subscription model provides a clear and simple migration path to cloud-based print solutions. This enables you to meet customers where they are now and guide them to the cloud at their own pace. This protects their current fleet investment - without a 'rip and replace' approach – and helps them sweat that asset just a little more.

Second, it’s important to own the entire fleet - every single device – and it’s here where a different approach can make a big impact. For years, the focus has been on the big MFDs. But what about the rest of the printers scattered around the office? The desktop print in the CEO’s office, the one in the legal department, the prescription printer in a doctor’s office - those are often unmanaged, unsecure, and create a frustrating experience for users.

With those examples in mind - and your competitors focused on the main MFD contract - you have a massive opportunity to lead with a story for a customer’s entire fleet. Be the one who asks about those forgotten devices. Powerful and flexible print management solutions enable you to bring every printer, from the oldest desktop model to the newest MFD, under one simple, secure print management solution. This will enable you to provide a consistent, secure, and modern print experience for every employee, no matter what devices they’re using, not to mention simplifying the process for tracking print costs.

Finally, help to solve the hybrid work puzzle, because the challenges of hybrid work are real and persistent. It’s no longer just about managing a single office location; it’s about supporting users as they move between multiple locations - the main office, a regional branch, their home, or even a co-working space.

This created a huge headache for IT teams trying to ensure everyone can print easily and securely wherever they are. By solving this complex logistical problem using print management solutions engineered from the ground up for this very scenario, you’re delivering value that goes far beyond the device itself.

From challenge to opportunity

As we’ve established, the market for new hardware sales is seeing a dip. But the underlying dynamics - the need to optimize costs, manage a mixed-age fleet, and solve the hybrid work puzzle - have created the ideal conditions for software-led solutions.

I believe that the channel and ISVs can work together to turn these market conditions into your biggest competitive advantage while adding value, boosting security, and simplifying print… wherever users are based.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now part of daily life, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that everyone is already AI-savvy and integrating it into their daily lives and work. On a consumer level, this may be true, but the real work of integrating AI into the enterprise – and even into the mid-market – is only just getting started.

In fact, when we look at the industry today, a large number of AI pilots and proof-of-concepts are failing to pass to production. The challenge is that we have high aspirations for AI, but also that it is complex and rapidly evolving! VARs, SIs, and resellers need to keep their options open and stay agile if they’re to succeed – but let’s take a step back and look at the main issue in more detail for a moment.

Problems with PoCs

As anyone who has used generative AI on a consumer level knows, it is very powerful and helpful, but not perfect. AI tends to hallucinate and produce false results from time to time. Although it might have limited impacts on the individual level, when it’s deployed into the enterprise and business processes, it becomes unacceptable. Many organizations are finding that their AI pilot tests are coming across hallucinations and reliability issues, which are all hindering the rollout.

However, over the last few years, we have seen many successful implementations from other ‘flavours’ of AI, in particular, machine learning. The manufacturing and healthcare sectors have used this kind of AI to great effect, leveraging it for process optimisation and pattern recognition, which is a far more mature application than generative.

AI is also tremendously complex, which tends to hinder effective pilot tests because it’s hard to set success criteria. In many cases, organizations also struggle to scale AI after their pilot tests, which makes ROI hard to achieve. All of this is a significant opportunity for the channel to help consult with customers, guide them through projects with hard-won knowledge and expertise, and provide a fresh perspective on what will and won’t work.

Place your bets: Or keep them open

As I’ve already said, AI is still evolving. No one knows what the landscape will look like when it reaches maturity. It’s also likely that even when it does reach maturity, it’ll continue to change, much like how the internet continued transforming decades after its establishment - from static websites to social media, streaming, cloud services, and beyond. For this reason, it’s heartening to see that many of the models in the top ten AI listings are open-source, not to mention that the performance gap between these open-source models and their proprietary rivals is closing fast. We believe that the future of AI should be built on transparency, accessibility, and collective progress.

The advantage of using open source models for both customers and partners is that it’s easier to change. Open source is cheaper, provides better ROI for customers, better margins for partners, and helps both sides to avoid lock-in.

Furthermore, in the enterprise space, AI integrations will be critical as AI delivers more value when it's connected to existing data owned by companies. But one challenge with integration is that organizations - especially large ones - can still have many legacy systems in place, which require custom solutions to be integrated effectively. Data is the most critical asset for any company, so partners that can help to modernize legacy systems and unlock the data for AI integration will be in high demand.

The agent opportunity

However, despite these challenges, there is one very clear opportunity in AI that is approaching rapidly: agents. These are AI systems that can use the tools that have historically been used by humans, and ‘do the work’ instead. We’ve all heard the stories about AI making restaurant bookings for humans, but in the future, this kind of approach will be the norm.

There’s a tremendous amount of work to do at the back end before this becomes standardized. In many ways, the shift from manual web use to chatbots has been like the shift from cars with manual transmissions to automatic gearboxes – but the shift to agentic AI will be more akin to the shift from automatic cars to autonomous cars.

This is a challenging step, because for many organizations, taking your hands off the wheel is both daunting and uncertain: we don’t know the optimal place for the human to give away control and the agent to take it. But the change is coming, and in a very large number of cases, agents will be the primary users of services, not humans.

The challenge is that this requires a lot of re-engineering. Interfaces that have been designed for people will need to be re-coded for agent use, usually via APIs. This means re-thinking processes, understanding where users fit into the journey, and where the agent comes in. Customers, partners, and vendors will need to work closely together to meet this challenge, and it’s something we’re already looking at very closely with the launch of a new partner program to help organizations get their SaaS ready for AI.

Again, this is an opportunity for partners to guide and consult, offering guidance on how end-users use services, as well as how to optimally engineer experiences for both humans and AIs. However, one of the main challenges for partners is that the AI landscape is still rapidly evolving, and no one quite knows which horse to back, which makes open standards doubly important.

Know (and guide) your customer

With such rapid change, guiding and supporting customers is essential to successful AI projects, creating and maintaining margin for partners. The opportunity that AI agents present is unprecedented, but it’s critical that partners help to set clear objectives, shape successful pilot tests, build scalability into use cases from the start, and measure ROI effectively.

This then helps customers turn AI tests into profitable commercial projects. At the same time, it’s vital that partners stay agile throughout the process – and open-source is a key way of doing this and avoiding lock-in.

Change is coming, and the channel has an enormous opportunity and role to play in making sure that customers are guided to pragmatic ways of rolling out AI, building on firm foundations and establishing reliable, agile systems that will stand the test of time – while also providing strong revenue streams for partners – even when the machines are in charge!

Many small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) might struggle to afford third-party relationships - like those with channel partners - or have a specific need or capacity for models that see someone closely manage their technology for them.

Instead, they might want to do it themselves, creating a DIY-style initiative that builds a system with parts from many different platforms, tools, or cloud services.

Could such an approach be dangerous? Essentially, bringing with it risks to security, among other issues for internal operations such as compliance, delivery, and productivity. Or, is it entirely possible? And, if it can be achieved, how would this be done?

Eleanor Watson is a member of the IEEE, the world’s largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity. As an AI ethics engineer, she works principally as a machine intelligence researcher.

Watson is in agreement that for SMBs with limited budgets, the use of channel partners “might not be feasible”. She believes the DIY approach is sound and can work for SMBs but only “when treated as a disciplined strategy, rather than cost-cutting”.

“As a first step, businesses should map business-essential functions (finance, HR, sales, compliance) and assign clear ownership for each system’s uptime and data security,” she explains.

“Invest in architecture first: build a clean, modular stack using open standards (SSO, OAuth2, API-first systems), and document relentlessly. Begin with a manageable scope – self-hosted basics or low-code automation – while maintaining flexibility to integrate external providers later.”

That’s not to say there won’t be any challenges with such an implementation, as Watson is happy to concede. “Achieving interoperability without fragility is the primary challenge,” she warns. “Vendor APIs evolve; dependencies break. Without dedicated integration expertise, SMBs must maintain test environments and version control for configurations.”

Cybersecurity resilience is “equally demanding”, she adds, stating: “A single ransomware incident or supply-chain compromise can cripple an unsegmented network. Apply zero-trust principles – robust identity management, privilege separation, encrypted backups – as foundational defaults, not afterthoughts.”

Risks vs rewards

The most common types of IT channel partners are the likes of value-added resellers (VARs), systems integrators (SIs), managed service providers (MSPs), managed security service providers (MSSPs), and consultants. Vendors they use often include AWS, Google, IBM, and Microsoft, and a channel partner usually provides online training and certification to an SMB.

Ian Anderson, senior director of partner sales at Park Place Technologies, understands the “temptation” of DIY but concurs with Watson, believing the risks must be clearly identified and understood first if SMBs push ahead with this approach.

He cites how a good partner might “understand the business, environment, and resources in a way a DIY approach never can,” but does admit: “The reality is most channel partners have gaps in their service range. They can’t be experts in everything. This is why the smartest SMBs look for partners who are, in turn, supported by specialist service providers to fill those gaps – whether professional or managed services.”

However, for those who still wish to go it alone, Watson has more advice to follow. “Meaningful savings come from open-source platforms, consumption-priced cloud services, and internal automation replacing external consultancy,” she explains. “AI copilots for documentation, compliance drafting, or troubleshooting can substantially reduce administrative overheads.”

Watson also points to the issue of believing you are making savings when actually you might cost yourself more in the long run, adding: “The real economic advantage is agility: direct system control enables rapid iteration without vendor lock-in. However, cheap setups requiring costly rescue operations are common – beware of these false economies.”

Smart work vs hard work

The risk of a DIY approach is greater for mid-sized organizations compared to those smaller businesses, according to Matt Fox, chief operating officer at technology consultancy TXP.

“If mid-sized organizations are to avoid a piecemeal approach to IT modernization, they require a joined-up approach to technology and people,” he says.

“Mid-sized organizations can work smarter, not harder, by working with an external IT provider that has the skills and resources required to fully address their IT needs.”

Fox adds: “However, channel providers need to go beyond simply augmenting team numbers or selling products to provide a transformational service. A successful relationship with a channel partner will involve at least some element of knowledge transfer as experts share their expertise with their partner’s team.

“This ‘teacher-learner’ relationship brings value beyond a simple transaction to working with the channel, and it ought to be the gold standard when working with partners for IT implementation.”

In the real world, there are no clear rules on when to DIY, when to begin with a channel partner, or when to move from doing it yourself to getting third-party help and guidance.

But Siyar Isik, CEO of Eskritor, an AI-powered writing assistant tool, believes DIY is possible when the right guardrails are in place. “Not every small business has to lean on channel partners for IT,” he admits.

“Some can manage on their own, but only if they stay realistic about what is possible.”

Isik’s first advice would be “to start simple” with tools like Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, which have been built with small teams in mind.

“They come with great support communities and plenty of clear documentation. That takes a lot of pressure off the team,” he says.

While it is possible to reduce overheads by cutting costs and avoiding long contracts, there are clear areas where it would be dangerous to compromise, according to Isik.

“Data protection, backups, patching, and continuity planning need to be airtight,” he insists.

“Skipping those is like skipping insurance. A DIY approach can work, but only if a business goes in with clear eyes about its limits and refuses to cut corners on the areas that matter most.”

Weighing up the time outlay

Watson is also concerned about other pitfalls. “Most DIY IT failures stem from underestimating complexity debt,” she explains.

“Integration across accounting, customer relationship management (CRM), and inventory systems can spiral without professional oversight. Security hardening, patch management, and compliance consume more time than expected. Staff turnover erases undocumented expertise, orphaning systems.”

And although the use of Agentic AI tools in an SMB setting might offer simplified management, these can also “amplify errors when unsupervised”, Watson warns.

“Autonomous misconfiguration – AI making confident but destructive changes without full context – is an emerging risk,” she highlights. “Governance remains essential regardless of tooling intelligence.”

There are also real benefits, however, according to Watson. These include full control over architecture, data, and priorities, plus faster iteration and innovation cycles. Deep understanding of your digital infrastructure and reduced dependency on opaque vendor ecosystems are two more.

“Properly managed, DIY IT builds organisational technological literacy – a durable competitive asset,” she adds.

At BI Worldwide, a partner with 300+ Fortune 500 clients, there is clearly an appetite for help from customers who do not wish to go down the DIY path or can’t do so. Deborah Watson, its client and solutions strategy director, suggests asking what a good partner might “bring to the table” before choosing one.

She explains: “This means asking the right questions: is your partner part of a programme that rewards them for investing in training, support, and customer success? If not, you may not be getting the full benefit of what a channel relationship can offer.

“SMBs should ask whether their chosen partner is part of such a programme – it can be a strong indicator of the quality and reliability of the support they’ll receive. Understanding whether their partner is supported in this way can help assess the long-term viability of a DIY approach versus a channel-supported model.”

Planning for growth

For Colin Crow, managing director at digital transformation specialist Nexer Enterprise Applications, the big risk with DIY is “you only know what you know”.

“You might be fortunate enough to have a small team of tech talent in-house, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are experts in the specifics of the new system you’re implementing or on how to manage the change across the organization,” he says.

“With a partner, you can get the best of both worlds: control over your vision, with expertise on tap to keep you on track.”

However, Zayed Ahmed – who started as a call center agent before founding outsourcing company ASL BPO – believes the go-it-alone route has plenty of positives. They believe it’s just about understanding where the pitfalls are on your journey that might then mean you need greater levels of outsourced help.

“I see very few who succeed with a pure DIY approach,” he says. “They often start there, setting up basic tools like email platforms, cloud storage, or password managers. It feels manageable at the beginning and helps keep costs down.

“But as soon as compliance or security comes into the picture, things change quickly. Most internal teams cannot keep up with constant updates in regulations or the latest cyber threats. Missed patches, poor backup routines, or weak access controls can cost far more than what was saved upfront."

That is why Ahmed suggests SMBs heed this piece of advice: “The question should not be ‘DIY or partner?’ but ‘what mix works best for your stage of growth?’”

Amazon Web Services (AWS) will be relying heavily on its extensive independent software vendor (ISV) and systems integrator (SI) networks to drive adoption of its new agentic AI services, according to a senior company figure.

Speaking to ITPro at AWS re:Invent, Rohan Karmarkar, managing director of AWS’ partnership solutions architecture, said partners will be critical in supporting successful integration for customers.

The annual conference, hosted at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, saw AWS announce a raft of new agentic AI-powered services, including a range of powerful ‘frontier agents’ and a platform aimed at helping enterprises build their own AI models.

This sharpened focus on agentic AI for AWS comes at a pivotal time in the evolution of the technology, according to CEO Matt Garman, and simplifying adoption will be crucial in this process.

Services like Amazon Bedrock and AgentCore will play a key role in this process, and Karmarkar emphasized that this is where partners will once again be the unsung heroes driving adoption.

“Our network has more than 140,000 partners,” he said. “Partners were critical for our business right from day one.”

Only the best for AWS customers

AWS maintains somewhat of a strict set of rules for partners, however. With a sprawling ecosystem, ensuring that customers are given access to the best of the best is a key value proposition for the hyperscaler.

For example, last year AWS launched its AI Competency scheme, which identifies preferred partners that can provide support in AI adoption, from the early stages to those later on in the implementation process.

“[We have] partners who can get the time to value quickly. We have a lot of partners doing that,” he said.

“This year we’ve evolved that [AI competency] to add agentic capabilities as well,” Karmarkar added.

“So in order to attain that competency, partners have to prove they have not just the technical capabilities they have around implementing AI applications and use-cases, but also customer success metrics, like whether these are in production or at the PoC stage.”

These preferred capabilities are crucial when validating partners for the Competency scheme, which at this stage includes over 45 partners, according to Karmarkar.

Success rates so far through this scheme are promising, Karmarkar told ITPro, and the hyperscaler closely monitors key metrics to ensure customers are getting the best bang for their buck.

“So when customers do projects with our AI Competency partners, they tend to have a 25% faster path to product,” he revealed. “That’s one of the metrics we do measure from the competency perspective.

“The other thing that is very critical for us as we work with partners is the right way of ‘working back from the customers’ - that’s within the AWS DNA where we try to understand what the outcome you want, and then start building a solution for that, rather than building a solution which starts from the technology.”

On the ISV front, this is an equally important focus for AWS, allowing customers to streamline the adoption and integration of technologies and tools.

“A lot of capabilities that ISVs are building in their own existing products, and new features in their products, these capabilities customers are going to get out of the box.”

Supporting partners

While partners play a critical role in supporting enterprise end-users, Karmarkar said the raft of agentic AI tools launched by the company this week is also intended to be a springboard for partners themselves.

This is a mantra that lies at the heart of the company’s long-running partnership focus; it’s an ecosystem that drives innovation across the board.

“The vision we have with a lot of the AI capabilities that we are launching is to make those capabilities not just for partners to consume, but also partners to extend from,” he explained.

“So they can build, bringing in their own expertise, to further differentiate themselves and to drive the right outcomes for the customers.”

Cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike has been selected for HPE’s Unleash AI partner program to deliver end-to-end protection for high-performance AI initiatives.

The collaboration will see the CrowdStrike Falcon platform integrated into HPE Private Cloud AI – the company’s turnkey AI factory co-developed with Nvidia – to equip customers with unified endpoint, identity, cloud, and data protection across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

CrowdStrike’s addition to HPE’s Unleash AI program builds on the companies’ existing collaborative efforts to secure end-to-end AI initiatives – including large language models (LLMs) powered by Nvidia. The pair’s wider strategic partnership features integrations between the Falcon platform and HPE software, including HPE Zerto and HPE OpsRamp.

The move also broadens CrowdStrike’s established partnership with Nvidia, which focuses on delivering always-on AI agents for tackling enterprise security.

In an announcement, CrowdStrike’s chief business officer, Daniel Bernard, said the company’s selection by HPE is a reflection of its security leadership in the AI era.

“HPE’s recognition underscores what customers tell us every day: CrowdStrike is the platform of record for protecting AI workloads, agents, infrastructure, and data,” he commented. “Together with HPE and NVIDIA, we’re uniting performance, scale, and security to help enterprises build trusted AI from the ground up.”

HPE Unleash AI

Back in 2024, HPE released its Private Cloud AI platform, a turnkey, cloud-based AI factory designed to help organizations deploy and simplify the process of operationalizing generative AI applications and virtual assistants.

To complement the offering, the company also introduced the Unleash AI partner program to connect Private Cloud AI customers with independent software vendors ISVs), systems integrators (SIs), and service providers operating across the data and AI application layers of the tech stack.

The initiative sees partner solutions curated and pre-validated to run in HPE Private Cloud AI with the aim of speeding customers’ time-to-value and driving gains across AI use cases.

“Through the HPE Unleash AI partner program, we’re bringing together trusted innovators like CrowdStrike to help enterprises confidently operationalize AI,” said Robin Braun, HPE’s vice president of AI business development for hybrid cloud.

“CrowdStrike’s AI-native platform and its proven integrations with HPE and Nvidia exemplify how we’re enabling secure, high-performance AI for customers.”

As organizations race to modernize and adopt AI, many are skipping a crucial step: ensuring their software actually works, and works well. With high-profile instances of poor quality software - the CrowdStrike outage from last year, and the historic Post Office saga - causing global disruption and reputational disaster, brands simply cannot risk delivering poor quality software to the market.

Our recent 2025 Quality Transformation Report showed that, in the pursuit of speed, quality is being sidelined. Nearly two-thirds of global businesses admit to deploying code without fully testing it, and the consequences are catching up. More than forty per cent estimate that their annual losses from poor-quality software exceed $1 million, with financial services firms reporting the most dramatic shortfalls.

This isn’t just about budget overruns: it’s about trust, resilience, and risk. Two-thirds of organizations expect a major outage or disruption within the next year, and a quarter of them consider that risk “extreme.” Yet while the threat is clear, few companies have the internal resources or expertise to tackle it. The result is a growing dependency on external partners for quality assurance - not just for execution, but also for guidance.

Why partners must lead with quality

Too often, quality assurance (QA) is treated as a narrow technical task at the tail end of a project. In reality, it should be front and center. Done right, quality assurance helps reduce technical debt, de-risk transformation, and protect user experience. In a digital world where downtime and poor performance are no longer tolerated, clients can’t afford to get this wrong. Users have options, and if one app fails to meet expectations, switching to an alternative takes seconds. Brand loyalty evaporates quickly when quality fails.

This is where MSPs, ISVs, and SIs have a critical role to play. The opportunity isn’t simply to help implement new technologies. It’s to lead with quality, acting as trusted advisors who bring structure, discipline, and strategy to software delivery.

Most clients don’t have the in-house capability to run comprehensive QA programs. They’re looking for someone who can help them make sense of the bigger picture: aligning technology with business goals, defining outcomes, estimating resources, managing timelines, and ensuring performance across complex, evolving stacks.

Reframing quality assurance: From afterthought to business imperative

Partners need to help clients reframe QA not as a value-add, but as a necessity - as fundamental as cybersecurity or compliance. Think of QA like insurance: it’s the safeguard against costly rework, outages, negative headlines, and lost revenue.

Poorly tested software doesn’t just damage a product. It can sink a reputation. We’ve all seen what happens when critical systems fail. Whether it’s operational disruption or, in some high-profile cases such as the Post Office, legal consequences stemming from preventable flaws.

Even as new technologies promise faster delivery, they also introduce new risks. AI is a prime example. While over 80% of IT leaders express excitement about using AI to accelerate delivery and automate repetitive tasks, there are serious concerns about governance, explainability, and trust.

The same tools that can help accelerate QA can also introduce bias or create blind spots if deployed without discipline. That’s why our report finds that organizations want more than automation. They want responsible implementation and to trust that what’s being deployed is not just fast, but right.

A new kind of partner engagement

Here too, partners are uniquely positioned to lead. By offering services like AI-driven testing, quality intelligence, and autonomous validation, they can help clients bridge the gap between innovation and reliability. According to our report, nearly all respondents - a staggering 99.89% - believe autonomous testing will play a valuable role in QA, particularly in improving speed, analyzing test results, and maintaining test cases. This opens the door to a new kind of partner engagement - one focused on enabling quality at scale, even as complexity increases.

The takeaway is simple: the market needs partners who understand that quality is not a phase, it’s a mindset. From initial advisory conversations through to implementation and ongoing support, partners who embed QA into every phase of delivery will be the ones who earn lasting trust. That means helping clients define quality standards, establish outcome-driven metrics, and build automation frameworks that scale with their ambitions.

In the AI era, speed matters. But trust matters more. Organizations that ignore software quality are gambling with their future. Meanwhile, those who build with resilience in mind can move both faster and smarter.

For today’s partners, this is a moment to lead. Not by selling solutions, but by shaping them. Not by reacting to quality failures, but by preventing them. The next wave of transformation won’t be won by those who simply deploy AI; it will be led by those who ensure it works.

The economy is in a difficult situation. ONS figures show that the UK economy grew by 0.1 percent in the first quarter of 2023 and the cost-of-living crisis continues to affect confidence. 

While the technology sector has traditionally been able to weather tough conditions, that's not the case this time around. 

Even areas like IT security are facing challenges. While Gartner predicted this market will continue to grow by 11.1% year-on-year through to 2026, this increase in spending will have to be stretched further to keep pace with emerging threats. 

CISOs are having to look at their strategies with fresh eyes in order to stretch budgets, including potentially consolidating the number of vendors they work with.

So what will these consolidation exercises look like, and how can channel partners capitalize?

What should consolidation mean to your customers?

When we use the term consolidation, we typically mean cost-cutting. However, for security teams, the ability to reduce costs should not be conflated with decreasing budgets, which will ultimately leave teams without critical resources. 

The challenge is how to make budgets go further and invest where companies need it, rather than this being an exercise in having money taken away.

Waiting until customers ask about this approach is too late. Instead, taking a proactive approach can put you - and your customer’s security team - in the driving seat when it comes to how projects are defined and what the success metrics are.

To get started, analyze how your customer manages their security processes and the products. It’s easy to build up shelfware that is either not being used, or only utilized for tasks that are not valuable enough to carry on spending on them. 

These solutions can be removed and replaced with more cost-effective options, especially where other solutions can be used to cover the same tasks.

This may throw up some interesting findings. You may find yourself dealing with challenging scenarios and internal company politics. For example, you may find that processes are not as efficient as they could be, or that teams are relying heavily on manual work to get things done.

In a worst case scenario, you may uncover something that is not compliant with an industry standard or regulation. 

It’s important to be tactful here, as security teams may have invested a lot of their time into building and evolving their processes. With anything that has been in place for a while, this can create a lot of attachment. While we all like to think of ourselves as rational beings, this is not always the case. 

Taking a diplomatic approach can pay off as no-one likes to think of their deployment as wasteful.

Building back up again

Once you have established the tools, processes, and people involved in delivering security, you can assess the potential overlaps and where consolidation can occur. 

Every vendor talks about the mythical single pane of glass for security, and you may find that customers have multiple ways of achieving this result. They may even be running multiple product suites for their security and risk management requirements, from identity management through to firewalls, network security, and cloud.

From here, you can look at how to consolidate and improve security operations. 

This may remove some tools, but the main goal should be to achieve better processes and faster delivery. Ideally, you can reduce the overall vendor count and make use of more integrated suites of services rather than multiple products. 

This can make a big difference in cloud environments, where customers would otherwise have to run multiple agents to get the security services they need. Taking a ‘one agent’ approach reduces the overall amount of compute resources required to manage security services, which helps the customer save costs.

On top of this audit, you can move into recommending how best to consolidate and maintain security levels. For example, many companies will subscribe to a threat intelligence feed, but do they make use of it? 

Instead, can you supply a service that combines multiple feeds for better coverage while also offering recommendations on where to improve over time. This delivers an ongoing revenue opportunity while helping customers reduce their spending on specific security products.

Alongside this, explore ways  you can help the customer to automate their processes where possible. These efforts not only help the security team work faster and more efficiently, but it can show where there are ways to improve processes and working practices. 

Security vendors are all deploying AI and machine learning to streamline processes, but this should also be used to free up focus time for security analysts.

Looking for more opportunities around value

While security consolidation projects may set out to cut costs, they might lead to other opportunities that you can build on. For instance, many companies now need more help in communicating their security position to their internal leadership teams or the board. 

This calls for more risk management support, but it also requires nuanced communication support as well. It is not enough to just provide a dashboard – instead, you may need to help security teams work on how they communicate with leadership.

Improving communication is a great secondary objective for consolidation projects. By cutting the number of tools involved, you can remove some of the headaches for security teams about getting the right data together. 

On top of this, you can make it easier for them to demonstrate they are doing a good job.

Many companies need help on security consolidation projects. To maximize these opportunities, start by looking for overlaps and gaps. Once this audit is complete, you can make recommendations on how to reduce the number of vendors, integrate those that are in place, and make processes more efficient for everyone involved. 

The result should save the company money, but it should also deliver better security posture for the future.

IT distributor and solutions aggregator TD SYNNEX has announced a new Independent Software Vendor (ISV) experience, designed to help accelerate Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) opportunities in the channel.

The initiative takes advantage of the company’s partner ecosystem to help power IT operations, automate complex processes, as well as deploy new functionalities.

The firm says the framework will provide ISVs with enablement at every stage of the ISV lifecycle, helping to drive sales, boost go-to-market practices, and deliver successful business outcomes for users.

“With the explosive growth in the multi-hybrid cloud solutions space, we have implemented a streamlined ISV experience framework that ensures we curate the channel’s best ISV solutions marketplace,” announced Francisco Criado, vice president of Cloud, Data, and IoT at TD SYNNEX.

The ISV experience offers three tiers of offerings, each featuring different program capabilities tailored for ISVs of different sizes, ranging from startups to mature companies.

The first, dubbed ‘Business Acceleration’, centres on offerings built to help ISVs innovate and automate their business at their own pace, while ‘Technical Aggregation’ aims to help ISVs build monthly recurring revenue models with access to the TD SYNNEX advanced cloud platforms Stellr and StreamOne.

The third – ‘Marketing as a Service’ – brings additional capabilities to continue the building and enhancing of ISVs’ channel practices as they look to scale their respective SaaS businesses.

TD SYNNEX said the new framework will deliver a wide range of benefits, including automated billing, provisioning, and management for easier transactions via its cloud marketplaces, as well as multi-cloud billing with support for consumption and subscription-based pricing models.

There’s also access to the aggregator’s IT solutions provider ecosystem, SaaS delivery models and cloud-ready applications, its range of professional services, on-demand marketing programmes, as well as its experts in next-generation technology.

“By leveraging our strong vendor relationships, combined with unparalleled solutions aggregation and support capabilities, we are committed to helping ISVs accelerate business growth,” Criado said.

The company claims its latest announcement represents the “most inclusive and comprehensive” ISV experience that’s currently available in the market.

Vortex 6, iasset.com, and Channel Mechanics have announced the Channel Collective, a collaborative channel endeavour designed to offer an improved automation experience for partners.

Dedicated to increasing revenue and achieving operational efficiency within the IT channel, the three ISV’s offerings are uniquely designed to provide better outcomes for vendors, distributors, VARs and service providers within the IT ecosystem.

The Channel Collective now combines iasset.com’s leading installed base management platform, Vortex 6’s innovative SaaS for automated multi-vendor partner programme compliance, and Channel Mechanics’ award-winning channel automation platform.

Enabling visibility of all three offerings, the initiative allows enables customers to utilise them all in tandem to streamline operational processes – regardless of which partner programme they are subscribed to.

“The channel collective originated from an idea generated from observing an extraordinary volume of channel software companies operating with a common purpose,” explained Scott Frew, CEO of iassett.com, who initially suggested the partnership.

“That being to assist our customers in selecting quality solutions that automate the parts of customers’ business that transact with essentially disparate vendor, distributor SPs and VAR operating processes.”

When integrated, the complimentary solutions can provide an “exponential multiplier” in productivity, cost reduction, as well as opportunity acceleration, Frew added.

“This initiative is aimed to help our partners achieve better value and maximum revenue from their engagement with us, which will deliver a win:win for all concerned,” commented Peter Olive, Cortex 6 CEO. “Our platforms are complimentary and together we are able to deliver a level of automation that is unique in the market today.”

Thanks to this complimentary nature of the Channel Collective’s solutions, the platform is well-equipped to meet the ever-changing and demanding needs of the eco-system, as more vendors shift to the cloud.

“Our coming together provides a level of automation to the channel, previously unimaginable,” added Kenneth Fox, CEO of Channel Mechanics. “For the vendors, distributors and partners leveraging our solutions as part of their go-to market strategy, they are seeing accelerated revenue and new levels of data insights shaping their growth trajectories.”

ISVs that want a bit of help getting apps seeded on Salesforce’s AppExchange can breath a sigh of relief, as the cloud giant is bringing its popular Accelerate partner assistance programme to Europe.

Leon Mangan, vice president of channel and alliances at Salesforce EMEA, confirmed the news at the company’s World Tour London event this week.

“The Accelerate programme is there to do exactly what it says on the tin. That is to drive and accelerate partners who want to develop ISV solutions on the AppExchange,” he said.

“It’s a programme of getting people through our AppExchange process. It’s a mentoring and coaching model - we’ll do webinars, lunch and learn, workshops and give each of the partners we take on a mentor.”

Much like in the US – where the programme has existed since early 2016 – Salesforce will take applications in batches, focusing on high-growth sectors, the first of which will be those developing apps for fintech and insurance.

“In later phases, we’ll be doing things in areas like life science or retail,” Mangan added.

“Fintech and insurance is our biggest addressable market opportunity. I don’t know in what sequence [other areas] will follow, but we will be looking at [the] next phase based on our addressable opportunities and where the demand is.”

Interested partners will be able to submit their applications for the programme at the end of June, but competition is likely to be tough as there are just 20 places available. The programme will then kick off in September, supported by the entire Salesforce business, with individuals from different departments volunteering their time to act as mentors.

To whittle down the number of contenders, Mangan said Salesforce will be looking for ecosystem partners that share the same core values as the firm, in particular, the 1:1:1 model of giving back.

“One thing I really wanted to make clear to partners is we will not take on a partner in that programme unless they are pledging 1% [of their income to charity]. We’re not going to be doing any stringent checks and balances on that as trust is our number one value, but more and more of our partners are following the same 1:1:1 model as us,” he added.

“We will have a stringent process – it’s not only that they’re intending to build on the platform, but also what their vision and values are around what they’re trying to and deliver and ensuring it is fit for purpose; that it creates value in that market.”

Salesforce has bold ambitions to grow the size of its partner ecosystem, the company confirmed today during its annual Dreamforce event in San Francisco.

There are two key focus areas for this growth: services and ISVs, Tyler Prince, Salesforce's worldwide executive vice president of alliances and channels told assembled delegates during the show's opening keynote, which was totally partner-focused.

Citing a soon-to-be-released IDC study, Prince said that the service opportunity linked to the Salesforce platform was circa $135 billion. He referenced a similar IDC study from last year that predicted Salesforce would be likely to be five times the size of SAP in terms of service opportunity come 2018.

"If you’ve made your bets on Salesforce, you’ve placed an excellent bet. If you have other choices to make within your ecosystem, I strongly encourage you to shift those dollars and focus on this incredible opportunity and look for ways to take advantage of that," Prince said.

Outside of this massive services prize on offer, Salesforce also wants to expand its ISV reach. And Prince has been given a mandate to go for 5x growth over the next five years.

"To do that we need to do a number of things we have to do and a number of investments we have to make. We need to continue to enable you and get you to market quicker to help you be successful in the field," Prince said.

"We need to continue to innovate and build incredible features and products you can take advantage of and leverage those into the solutions you take to market. We also need to invest in joint customer success and make our customers successful as our joint business model is predicated on that."

Stay tuned to Channel Pro and its sister sites Cloud Pro and IT Pro this week for more news, views and updates from Salesforce's Dreamforce this week.

Database management systems (DBMS) vendor TmaxSoft has launched an attack on Oracle (NYSE:ORCL) with the hope of luring ISVs away from the market leader.

The South Korean vendor has launched a recruitment drive for UK channel partners, and hopes to highlight the opportunities for ISVs to “move away from expensive and complicated licensing agreements that are traditionally associated with the Silicon giants, especially Oracle.”

James Mills, sales director, TmaxSoft says that while databases act as the backbone for ISV software applications that run on operating systems, large software companies like Oracle have “crippled ISV profits.”

He comments: “There is a general perception that only Oracle databases can cope with the amount of data ISVs need to build their applications. To put it into perspective, if we think about how many programmes run on a Windows or Mac operating system, it gives us a good idea of the sheer number of applications that ISVs run. They depend on databases that are fast and reliable as the more working applications they have, the more value they are to their end-user.

“However, there is a rather large fly in the ointment. In order to run applications that integrate with Oracle’s databases, ISVs need to buy licenses. As with all types of Oracle licenses, these are generally complicated and expensive and significantly reduce profit margins. While ISVs are increasing their number of applications to boost profits, the licensing cost that this requires is dragging the margins down.”

TmaxSoft hopes to position itself as a credible alternative to its dominant rival “without the headache of complicated licensing structures.”

As part of its overall strategy to be market leader, product offerings also includes Tibero 6 DBMS, released in the first quarter of this year and has a wider range of functionality and greater stability.

Says James Mills: “This is the first time we’re seeing companies emerge from corners of the globe that are offering viable alternative (and cheaper) software to Oracle. ISVs can build with these databases, create as many fully functioning applications as they require, and can take home a greater percentage of their sales.”

Founded in 1997, TmaxSoft claims to hold 40 percent of the market in its native South Korea, and hopes to replicate that success in EMEA.

A Cloud Evolution

The SaaS business model enables ISVs to reduce costs, enter new markets as well as launch and run a future-oriented SaaS business in the Cloud. But transforming an existing on-premises application into reliable, scalable software capable of supporting many customers simultaneously is not a small thing – however it's the business changes that are harder and still ongoing. In essence, the delivery method has changed, and therefore the business model of selling SaaS and Cloud services needs to change as well.

A New Way of Doing Business

While traditional software vendors are primarily concerned with application functionality and their customers are responsible for operating and managing the respective environments in which they run the software. A cloud vendor, on the other hand, needs to be equally concerned with operating and managing the environment that supports all its customers.

SaaS has been around long enough that most ISVs understand this and the basics of what SaaS brings - the benefits of a scalable and flexible, multi-tenant computing platform, alongside the risks and challenges such as legislation, security and performance. The right SaaS/Cloud enablement partner will help maximise these benefits and navigate the challenges.

For ISVs tapping into these benefits they are able to offer applications out to multiple customers, gaining economies of scale while allowing customers to only pay for what they use. They also have the ability to gain access to compute power when they need it - and only pay for what they use and need – and with the right deployment platform, it can be done in whatever cloud environment is needed(public or private). Furthermore, doing this though the Cloud also improves time to market and productivity, allowing ISVs to very quickly build and deploy new Cloud applications and services.

A New Business Model

This shift is happening throughout the software industry, delivering rapid technological changes, with new innovations and capabilities coming all the time. The introduction of a new compute paradigm (Cloud) combined with reduced budgets, means that long term licences aren't attractive to most customers any more.

As a result, a new approach to selling means that there needs to be a change to the way an ISV prices and markets its solutions. Similarly, moving from a traditional on-premises software business to a SaaS business can cause a significant amount of disruption to an established ISV.One of the key changes to the business model is the shift away from this traditional licensing model, which has peaks and troughs of income, to a more stable and constant revenue stream.

This change can also help cut churn rates, as there isn't the periodic 'big spend' crunch time that comes with traditional licensing contracts. However, this also can make additions and up-selling harder as these one-offs break the cycle of regular and predictable monthly payments.

New Requirements

From a delivery perspective, the move to SaaS and the Cloud brings changes to the business requirements too. As such, priorities need to shift when looking at developing a SaaS application. Where the traditional model was about maintenance and upgrades, ISVs have to get used to delivering a service, with SLAs that are in place and need to be maintained on an ongoing basis or face the possibility that customers could go elsewhere. ISVs also need to consider scalability, which is key to growth and fundamental to maintaining service quality as the volumes of users grow.

A New Remuneration Model

One of the biggest impacts that this shift in business and payments makes is to that of sales staff remuneration. The sales compensation model of paying commissions for selling big deals crumbles when there isn't a big contract for the customer to sign or big renewals to negotiate.Different ISVs are experimenting with alternate remuneration models and thus far it seems to vary depending on the company or industry, as well as the type of service being delivered.

Typical SaaS pricing also implies another important change in how organisations should think about their business. Traditionally, both sellers and customers view an ISV's fourth fiscal quarter as the most important, as that's when they're trying to land accounts and boost numbers for the year. However, with the SaaS business model, it is more about the length of the term of the contract and it is about continuously driving new business and it is all about increasing the volume of the business. The SaaS model, particularly when linked with a Cloud delivery platform also enables an ISV to look at what's going on in the market and quickly address changing market conditions, as well as look to new geographies – but once again this requires a change in how sales and marketing are perceived and executed.

A New Partnership

This level of change can be a daunting prospect for any ISV, and highlights the need for a partner that can not only deliver the technological underpinning to assist with this transition, but also provide consultancy and support on changing the underlying business too.

When looking to move to a Cloud-based proposition, ISVs should look to partner with someone that will provide all of the benefits of multi-tenancy, scalability, security, data encryption and so on, to allow them to deliver the best and most secure and reliable cloud based applications possible. The best partner possible will provide all of this as well as work with them as a business to shape the new strategy. This includes enabling the sales team to understand what the selling strategy is, how to change lead generation and marketing and use of the web and use of social media and so on.

ISV FactoryMaster is seeking additional business partners and resellers after seeing an increase in UK and global business over the last two quarters.

Based on Magic Software’s uniPaaS application platform, FactoryMaster’s software provides solutions to manufacturing, warehousing and wholesale industries. The company says it has seen success in the last quarter due to moves into new business areas, including food and drink manufacturers, process engineering, and electronics manufacturers.

Darran Neary, technical director at FactoryMaster explains: “Our recent success in these turbulent times is all due to flexibility. We’ve been able to successfully take on totally new verticals both nationally and internationally in a very short period of time due to the flexibility of our underlying software infrastructure and the way we can vary deployment to suit different customer requirements.”

FactoryMaster has recently embarked on international expansion, launching into the US, Ireland, India and Hungary. The new global strategy has brought dividends, according to Neary. “Again, flexibility has enabled us to rapidly tailor our offerings to fit specific international market niches, which has served us extremely well. In fact, we’re rolling out Russian, Hungarian, and French Canadian language support just to keep pace with demand. We’re also actively seeking new resellers and business partners to help continue this charge. It’s important to point out that partnering with us is free – it’s only when a customer uses the product that we charge anything.”

Neary says the firm has also seen success from a series of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings for the mobile market. Due to the flexibility of uniPaas, platform-independent mobile applications for warehousing and wholesale have been developed with “little business pain”: “It’s amazing how easily we can move from traditional open client to SaaS/mobile environments with uniPaaS. Now we can offer the right deployment model tailored to suit the needs our customers.”

Centrix Consulting spinoff Centrix Software is looking to grow a channel base for its first virtualisation release.

The ISV launched last November with the release of its WorkSpace of application platform. Mark Stradling, a former senior virtualisation executive at VMware and Citrix, has joined Centrix as a non-executive director. He explains: “The problem that our customers are facing is that they are getting a very distributed virtualisation environment with products from multiple vendors such as from Microsoft, Citrix and VMware. That’s presenting them with a real challenge on the desktop where applications from different virtualisation platforms are creating complexity at the end user level. Recognising this as a limiting factor, Centrix has created a solution to provide a single interface providing much better efficiencies.

“Clearly the vendors playing in this space have their own ways to aggregate applications on the desktop but they’re only interested in doing that for their own virtualisation product. What WorkSpace does is provide a cross platform solution, irrespective of how those applications are being delivered to the desktop,” adds Stradling.

Jon Fuller, operations director at Centrix Software says the firm developed the software in response to its consulting customers’ needs. “The consulting work we have done with these large companies over the past ten years is where we have gained the knowledge of the pain areas they are experiencing. So we have been developing software products – WorkSpace being the first of them – that will help them address those challenges the companies are facing,” he says.

“WorkSpace has been borne out of a consulting business, and it is software demanded by the customer. It’s arrived today as a result of customer demand, rather than other way round.”

Centrix is now looking to hire 20 partners in the UK, and is discussions with distributors that can provide coverage across EMEA and the US. “Recently we made a clear commitment to start selling through partners only – we are looking to set up a single tier reseller strategy and are also considering two-tier distribution to provide leverage in EMEA, and then aggressively start taking our product over to the US, then other parts of globe,” explains Stradling.

“In the short term we will look to engage new reseller partners with a history of selling into the virtualisation space and have experience in analysis testing and implementations of virtualisation solutions around high availability, backup recovery and consolidation. It will be attractive to those resellers as it’s another way to differentiate as many resellers are finding it difficult to compete and differentiate themselves from the hundreds of others that are already out there selling virtualisation products,” says Stradling.

“It will also carry significant services opportunities and provide them incremental margin and profit opportunities.”

Software as a service (SaaS) vendor NetSuite has today announced a major new addition to its enterprise software suite, allowing users and resellers to construct their own additions to the platform, and resell or offer them to other NetSuite users.

SuiteBundler is a new component of the company's SuiteFlex development environment, which was launched a year ago to allow NetSuite users to develop their own custom extensions to the NetSuite package, an all-encompassing hosted suite of business applications and tools including CRM, ERP, eCommerce and accounting functions.

"One of the biggest problems for the ISV community is how you add value to a hosted software service" said Zach Nelson, chief executive of NetSuite, speaking at the company's NetSuite Revolution conference in San Francisco.

SuiteFlex allows any NetSuite user or specialist to take an extension constructed in SuiteFlex, be it a custom dashboard, external data integration or custom application such as a training booking system, create a packed installer and then share or sell it to other users, or deploy it to other business units. Developers have full control over who they can share a bundle with, and whether it is made freely distributable or whether it is controlled.

"It has been a year since the launch of SuiteFlex, and in that time there has been a major transition happening in the IT services industry that is intrinsically linked to software as a service. The services industry is keen to get involved with SaaS, but needs a way to add value and access mid-market verticals that are painfully under-serviced by technology" said Nelson.

"The ability to take a piece of custom functionality that was designed as a one-off extension for one company in a particular vertical, and use it repeatedly across multiple instances of NetSuite in the same vertical has been the holy grail for services companies, yet it remains complex to achieve in SaaS solutions, particularly if you are a third party. SuiteBundler, combined with NetSuite, finally delivers on this promise, and truly enables VARs, systems integrators, and ISVs to develop and add value to NetSuite and support specific vertical market requirements"

As the NetSuite platform is centrally managed and hosted, all users are on the same version and migrated to new instances of the suite at the same time, ensuring compatibility of bundles as they are inserted into other instances of the NetSuite application.

NetSuite also announced a number of third-party vertical solutions developed with SuiteFlex and deployed across users using SuiteBundler, servicing vertical sectors including agriculture, publishing, retail and distribution and shipping management.