Peer-to-peer partnerships in the channel are on the rise, attendees of the recent Canalys Forums EMEA event were told.
But how open are top partners to the prospect of linking arms with a fellow VAR, MSP or consultancy to provide a total solution?
And what are the dos and don’ts of forging such relationships?
To mark the launch of the Pulsant Partnership Zone, IT Channel Oxygen caught up with leaders from seven top UK partners to get their views.
Talking to IT Channel Oxygen after the Canalys event, Canalys/Omdia Chief Analyst Alastair Edwards said although peer-to-peer partnering is not a new concept, it’s now happening “in a more structured way” partly thanks to the AI-driven skills shortage.
“Some of the vendors are being quite open about the number of partners that are now involved in every deal,” he said.
“They’re not necessarily working together, but you’ll see one partner doing the design and architecture, another doing the deployment and someone else doing the managed services.
“But more and more, you’re seeing partners working together. With AI, a lot of the skills don’t exist in house, so the channel partners are finding specialists with AI skills and then working with them – and that may well lead to an acquisition.”
One scenario Edwards said he is seeing more is AI consultants linking arms with partners who can build sovereign solutions.
“We’re getting this situation now where you’ve got these very services-oriented or consulting-led companies helping customers define their AI strategy,” he explained.
“Then the customer says, ‘okay, that’s fine, but we don’t want to run this in public cloud because we’re worried about sovereignty issues – we need to have somebody build a data centre for us or help us get access to private infrastructure’.
“Therefore the consultant is connecting them to a partner who will then design and build that infrastructure solution.”
Not all partners are on board with the concept. While one leader questioned below characterised peer-to-peer as “the only way a partner our size can truly evolve”, another said they want to offer their customers the full gamut of voice, connectivity, mobile IoT, cyber, AI and data in house.
Here IT Channel Oxygen catches up with leaders from Bechtle, Cisilion, Computacenter, Cyberfort, Focus Group, Phoenix Software and Softcat to find out what they really think of the rise of peer-to-peer…
“The only way a partner our size can truly evolve is to partner”
Rob Quickenden, CTO, Cisilion
How important are peer-to-peer relationships to Cisilion?
We do partner-to-partner a lot. In the Microsoft space in particular, we’re not a development house, so we use Microsoft partners for things like AI agent development.
We also have partners we use for organisational-level change management, and for some of the extreme Cisco contact centre [projects]. And we work with a couple of clients who are global and have got regional variations, so again we’re using partners -partnering is not a foreign thing to us.
What we’d like to see, and what we’re starting to see, is more reciprocal business back. I think a true partnership should be, ‘you give to us; we give to you’, and that’s probably the area we need to work hardest on.
Where do we want to be really great, and where do we draw the line and go, ‘we could do that, but it’s far easier to partner’?
What’s driving the rise of peer-to-peer?
I think it’s gone full circle. To use Microsoft as an example, they went through this approach of saying, ‘you need to be everything’, to then going back to saying, ‘what do you want to be known for – are you pure-play security, pure-play AI, pure-play Azure?’.
Most partners, if you look across the ecosystem, are a bit of everything, or at least they pretend to be.
But if you look at how partners are managed in the Microsoft world now, Microsoft only really manage what we would have called niche parters. So if you’re an absolute expert or Magic Circle partner for say Dynamics, you get a lot of love. If you dabble in Dynamics and Modern Work and security, you get nothing anymore. So for us, the only way a partner our size can truly evolve – because of the pace of change – is to partner.
What’s the biggest challenge you have around peer-to-peer?
The challenge is working out at what point you pivot and build that inhouse… at what point are you losing IP by partnering, versus actually servicing a client?
For change management, we’re working with people who are Prosci-certified. They know how to drive change in organisations, so that’s probably something where we’ll continue to partner because it’s quite a niche skill. Whereas, some of the things around Power Platform or AI agents, if we don’t get on that bandwagon ourselves we’re just going to get further behind.
See following page for the views of Phoenix Software MD Clare Metcalfe…
