As the technology landscape continues to change, channel partners are under increasing pressure to evolve faster than ever before. But success is no longer about trying to master every emerging trend. Instead, the focus is shifting toward specialisation, outcome-driven services and deeper vendor alignment, as partners look to balance technical complexity with customer value in an increasingly competitive market. Four channel experts all have their say on the question: Can channel partners realistically keep pace with the speed of technological change?
Paul Jackson, Director of EMEA Channel, Foxite:
The honest answer is only if we redefine what ‘keeping pace’ really means. The velocity of technological change today, driven by cloud, AI, security demands and consumption‑based models, makes it unrealistic for channel partners to master everything, everywhere, all at once. Those that attempt to do so often spread themselves too thin and end up adding limited value to their customers.
The partners who are succeeding have taken a more deliberate approach. They focus on depth over breadth, specialising in specific technologies, industries or customer outcomes, rather than chasing every emerging trend. This allows them to build genuine expertise, trusted advisory relationships and repeatable solutions, which customers increasingly value more than technical novelty.
At the same time, vendors have a responsibility to recognise that pace of change is not the channel’s problem alone to solve. If partners are expected to keep up, they need clear positioning, consistent product direction and realistic enablement paths – not constant programme changes or overly complex portfolios. Enablement has to be ongoing and practical, tied directly to revenue opportunities, not just certifications or feature updates.
We’re also seeing a shift in customer expectations. Many businesses don’t want every new capability immediately; they want help navigating choices, managing risk and extracting value from technology they already own. That plays directly to the channel’s strengths.
So yes, channel partners can keep pace, but not by running faster. They do it by being more selective, more focused, and more aligned with vendors who understand that sustainable success comes from partnership, not pressure.
Marianne Van der Pluym, EMEA Software Channel Director, One Identity:
In reality, many partners are faced with having to understand and deal with many complex technology topics: AI, identity, cloud, automation, digital sovereignty and NHIs – the technology surface area is expanding faster than anyone can master end-to-end, and the partners trying to do it all are the ones falling behind. The shift I’d urge channel partners to commit to is to focus on outcomes and the right approaches that deliver real measurable value for their clients and address the business problems customers are struggling to address.
The partners I see growing fastest aren’t generalists chasing every announcement. They’ve picked a domain and committed to it deeply enough to build managed services, assessment practices and outcome-based engagements around it. Identity is a clear example. Agentic AI and the explosion of machine identities have created problems most enterprises don’t yet know how to articulate, let alone solve. The partners who can walk a customer through assessing, governing and continuously validating a sprawling non-human identity layer are going to have meaningful pricing power for years.
What ‘keeping pace’ really means in 2026 is having a clear point of view about which technologies matter most to your customer base and building services depth in those areas. The partners who specialise will be in a much stronger position than the ones who stretch across everything thinly. The market is moving toward outcomes and away from resale, and that movement rewards partners who pick their lane and become the trusted advisor customers turn to as the market changes.
Raza Baloch, Head of Business Partners, Virgin Media Business Wholesale:
Technology is evolving at a pace we’ve never really seen before, particularly around AI. Every business now wants to be seen as being ‘AI-first’, but the reality is that many organisations are still working out how to properly use AI tools and apply them in a meaningful way. ChatGPT is often the most talked about example, but there are now huge numbers of AI tools available that businesses are only just starting to explore and understand.
That creates a major opportunity for channel partners. AI is helping level the playing field for smaller partners in particular. In the past, smaller businesses may have struggled to compete with larger organisations that had bigger teams and more resources. Now, with the right AI and automation tools, smaller partners can deliver strong customer experience, improve efficiency and compete at a much higher level, often without needing significant operational scale.
At the same time, AI is also helping larger organisations manage complicated systems and processes more effectively. In bigger businesses, especially those growing through acquisitions or consolidation, there are often multiple systems, processes and ways of working that can be difficult to manage. AI can help bring those systems together faster and improve efficiency across the organisation.
We’re already seeing AI make a real impact in customer service too, with businesses using it to improve response times, personalise support and reduce complaints. Ultimately, AI won’t replace jobs, but people and businesses that embrace AI will move faster than those that don’t. The channel partners that succeed will be the ones willing to adapt, experiment and use AI to improve both operations and customer experience.
Dennis Frank, Vice President, EMEA Strategic Partners & Alliances, Hitachi Vantara:
Realistically, yes, but the channel needs to be honest with itself about what that requires.
What we’re seeing right now is that a lot of partners helped customers build Generative AI pilots over the last couple of years. Some good work happened, but pilots are not production. When organisations try to move from an isolated proof-of-concept to something that runs across their whole IT infrastructure, that’s where the cracks appear. Legacy storage architectures can’t provide the throughput AI workloads demand. On-premise arrays hit performance ceilings. The infrastructure that was fine for everything else simply isn’t built for this.
The bigger issue, and this is something the industry hasn’t been honest enough about, is the data layer. Around 80% of the challenge sits there, not in the tooling. You can procure excellent GPU clusters, but if your data is unstructured, unclassified and effectively unreachable, the output will reflect that. A significant amount of enterprise data sits in exactly that state. Without the right data architecture underneath, AI tooling is just an expensive addition to foundations that can’t support it.
For channel partners specifically, the commercial model is also a problem. Most partner programmes still incentivise on transaction volume and capex cycles. AI infrastructure doesn’t work like that. Customers need consumption-based, flexible models that reflect how AI actually gets adopted. That gap hasn’t been addressed yet, and it needs to be.
The partners who keep pace will be the ones who move beyond hardware into genuine infrastructure capability. AI readiness is infrastructure readiness. That’s the conversation the channel needs to be having.
