1. The big channel switchover
Impact rating: 10/10
“I hope you can spot the trend”, Canalys CEO Steve Brazier gleefully asked the audience during his keynote at Canalys Forums 2023 in October.
The pattern he was referring to was the penchant for vendors to respond to the worsening economy in 2023 by cutting staff and moving business to the channel.
Dell’s switch to a “99%” partner-first model for storage in August amid reports of further cuts to its direct salesforce was a prime example. And in the same month, Rapid7 announced it will be “leaning heavily” on its managed services partners amid plans to trim its workforce by 18%.
“What we see in these difficult economic times is that it’s cheaper to sell through the channel than to do it all yourself. And that’s why we will see more and more companies switch to the channel,” Brazier said.
Partners have taken up the slack, in many cases taking on some of the 240,000 staff TechCrunch estimates have been cut at tech giants including Microsoft, Amazon and Google this year.
“The broader effect is that the market cooldown has also created a lot more stability, both around hiring and retention,” added Andre Azevedo, CEO of Google partner Ancoris.
Although we’re happy to highlight this as our biggest story of 2023, how long this channel love-in continues is another question.
“I think vendors go through the lifecycle of ‘right, we must have direct relationships’, and then a few years later someone else comes in and goes, ‘well, no, we shouldn’t do that, let’s focus on partners’. It tends to ebb and flow and I’m sure it will ebb flow again in the future,” Insight EMEA President Adrian Gregory said.
Doug Woodburn is editor of IT Channel Oxygen
