As Artificial Intelligence, observability and evolving customer expectations reshape the Middle East IT channel, partners have growing opportunities to move beyond traditional technology sales and build more profitable, service-led businesses. Abdul Rehman Tariq Butt, Senior Regional Director, META at SolarWinds, tells us how AI-driven innovation, stronger vendor partnerships and specialist expertise are enabling channel partners to deliver greater customer value, develop recurring services and expand their influence beyond the region.
How is the Middle East IT channel evolving and what is driving that change?
The channel is becoming a more important layer between vendor technology and the outcomes customers expect from it. AI makes that role particularly clear. Practically every vendor now has an AI story, but those stories describe very different capabilities. In some cases, AI adds a conversational interface to an existing product, while leaving what the product can actually do much the same. That may make it easier to use, but it is a long way from changing how a customer’s IT environment operates.
As a result, partners are becoming more discerning about the technologies they represent. They are looking beyond AI claims to examine vendor roadmaps, test how mature the capabilities are, and understand whether they work across the customer’s wider environment.
This is changing the value the channel brings to customers. Partners are increasingly combining technologies around a defined goal, rather than assembling a portfolio of features and leaving customers to work out how to use them. Their judgement about which capabilities are ready, how well they work together, and what results they can deliver is becoming as important as the products themselves. That ability to distinguish a useful capability from the noise is making the channel more valuable as AI becomes part of everyday IT operations.
Why are local channel partners so important to customers in the Middle East?
Of all the parties involved in a technology sale, the partner often has the most at stake. They’re the ones that must deliver on promises to customers. If an implementation takes longer than expected, support falls short or a project cannot be signed off, it is the partner’s relationship and reputation that is most exposed.
The best partners have built their businesses with that responsibility in mind. Many have worked with customers in this region for decades. They know the people making the decisions, the systems already in place and the practical constraints that do not always appear in a procurement document. They also understand local legal and commercial processes, contracting requirements and service expectations. Over time, that experience earns a level of trust that a vendor cannot establish through a product presentation alone. In many cases, a customer will give serious consideration to a new technology because a trusted partner has assessed it and is prepared to stand behind it.
This is a major reason why SolarWinds operates almost entirely through the channel in the Middle East. When a partner brings us an opportunity, it has often done considerable work to understand the requirement and judge whether our technology is a good fit. That makes for a stronger starting point for everyone, especially the customer. The partner is bringing forward a solution it believes it can deliver and support, rather than passing along a product recommendation and leaving the customer to work out the rest.
How will the SolarWinds 2026 Partner Program help partners grow their businesses?
A partner programme should make it easier for a partner to decide where to invest and what return it can expect from that investment. The SolarWinds Partner Program provides clearer tier criteria and a more predictable discount structure. It also expands marketing support, including co-branded resources and campaigns that partners can use to develop demand in their own markets.
Just as important is the investment in what partners can do for customers. Role-based training, certifications and new specialisations give partners a path to develop deeper expertise. Improvements to the partner portal, onboarding and deal processes are intended to make the everyday work of building a business with SolarWinds more straightforward.
For partners in the Middle East, those elements work best together. Commercial predictability gives them confidence to invest. Enablement helps them develop services around the technology. Their own customer relationships tell them where those services will be useful. The programme can support growth, but the most valuable result is a partner that can identify a customer problem, deliver the right solution and remain involved as the customer’s needs evolve.
What opportunities are you seeing for channel partners in Dubai?
It is tempting to answer that question by naming the technology or trend attracting the most attention today. The shortcoming with that approach is that the answer can change quickly. During the pandemic, customers had to rethink how they maintained continuity. More recently, the focus has shifted towards operational resilience: whether an environment can continue to support the business when it comes under pressure. AI is now changing what customers believe may be possible.
Dubai gives partners a particular advantage in responding to those shifts. Customers here are willing to evaluate emerging technology, and established integrators and distributors are prepared to look beyond familiar vendors when they see a better way to solve a problem. That willingness creates room for partners to bring forward an idea before a customer has written a formal requirement for it. But they can only do so if they keep reassessing the market, understand the technologies they represent and stay close enough to customers to know what might matter next.
The same expectation applies to us as a vendor. SolarWinds has roughly 25 years of experience in IT management, but partners do not include us in their plans simply because of our legacy and brand recognition. They have seen us move from network monitoring into broader observability, and our next conversations centre on AI and operational resilience. Our experience matters because it gives us a foundation to build on. We still need to show partners how our new features solve their customers’ current problems.
What opportunities will AI, AIOps and Agentic AI create for partners?
AI, AIOps and Agentic AI can investigate patterns, reduce repetitive work and help teams respond to issues with more context. Those capabilities are valuable, but they do not determine what a partner’s opportunity will be. That depends on what the partner chooses to do with the time and capacity they create.
One approach is to treat AI chiefly as a productivity exercise, and it might improve efficiency in the short term. But it can also leave the business with less capacity to learn, develop new offerings, or respond when customers ask for something different. In a market changing this quickly, I would be wary of treating that as the whole strategy.
The more interesting approach is to redirect people towards work that requires their understanding of the customer. If administrators spend less time sorting through alerts, they can examine why the same problems recur, improve the underlying environment and work on new services. Partners can help customers decide which outcomes matter, bring information together across technologies and determine where an AI recommendation should lead to action, and where a person should remain in control.
This creates opportunities for partners to expand their role. The gain is not simply doing yesterday’s work with fewer people. It is giving skilled people the capacity to do the work the partner and customer could not previously make time for.
How can partners build more profitable services around observability and IT management?
It boils down to economics. A large licence sale does not necessarily produce a large return once the effort behind it is considered. Partners create more value and drive higher profits when they offer expertise across deployment, integration, ongoing support and strategic decision-making.
Observability is particularly well suited to that kind of relationship because the work doesn’t end when the software is installed. Traditional monitoring might establish whether a server, switch or port is working, but a customer also needs to understand how its applications, databases, infrastructure and users affect one another. When an application slows down, the useful question is not merely which component produced an alert. It is what is happening across the service, what the business is experiencing and what should be addressed first.
Those questions keep changing as the customer adds applications, moves workloads and changes how people connect. A partner can help decide what needs to be visible, close gaps in that visibility, refine alerts, investigate recurring issues and turn the findings into improvements. It must invest in technical skills to do that well. In return, it can build a continuing services business around something the customer needs every day: the ability to see what is happening and act before a problem becomes a disruption.
Where do you see the biggest growth opportunities for Middle East partners in 2027?
For a long time, the assumption was that the more mature technology markets were in Europe, North America or parts of Asia-Pacific, and that expertise would flow from them into the Middle East. That may have described an earlier stage of the market. It is becoming much less useful as a guide to what is happening today.
The Middle East now has substantial investment in technology, customers prepared to try new approaches, and regional companies developing their own capabilities. We are reaching a point where partners here can create services, methods and intellectual property that have value beyond the region. A partner that has learnt to deliver AI-enabled operations or observability for a demanding customer here may have developed an approach that customers elsewhere need as well.
Traditionally, large international integrators brought their services into the Middle East. I see an opportunity to reverse that flow. It will require more than having an innovative idea: partners will need to make their expertise repeatable, demonstrate the results and build the capacity to deliver consistently in other markets. But the opportunity itself is significant. Middle East partners can increasingly be creators and exporters of technology-led services, rather than only adopters of approaches developed elsewhere.
