GEC NEWS WIREQ: How will AI and machine learning advancements shape the channel landscape, and what opportunities will they create for partners to differentiate themselves?
A: Investments in AI and machine learning over the past few years have been remarkable, creating significant opportunities for channel partners to differentiate themselves. For example, AI can automate repetitive tasks such as generating purchase orders, issuing certificates, or drafting contracts. These time-intensive processes can be completed much faster, enabling partners to focus on creativity, engineering, and more strategic activities.
Additionally, AI empowers partners to develop customer-specific solutions by analysing data, including customer information, behaviour, preferences, and other metrics. This allows for the creation of tailored offerings that address unique customer needs.
Most importantly, AI and ML can improve service quality and business continuity by enabling proactive issue resolution before they impact employees or customers. AI-driven observability and security tools, for instance, help customers achieve significant cost savings by preventing breaches or performance degradation. In many cases, issues are resolved automatically without the need for human intervention, enhancing efficiency and reliability.
Q: What strategies should channel partners adopt to capitalize on the growing demand for edge computing and localized data solutions in 2025?
A: To capitalise on the growing demand for edge computing and localised data solutions, partners must invest in their resources by providing necessary training and enablement programs. Establishing labs is crucial to allow engineers to experiment and develop self-sufficient solutions. As technologies evolve, morphing and merging them to create personalised solutions will be key, and this requires a hands-on approach.
While partners may not manufacture technology, allocating a research and development budget to innovate by leveraging multiple solutions together is vital. Such investments enable partners to develop vertical-specific products, which they can OEM or brand as tailored solutions addressing unique customer pain points. These strategic moves position partners as industry leaders capable of meeting evolving demands.
Q: With cybersecurity threats becoming more sophisticated, what innovative solutions should the channel prioritize to stay ahead of the curve?
A: To stay ahead of increasingly sophisticated cybersecurity threats, partners must innovate and go beyond conventional security solutions. Standard security measures alone are no longer sufficient to identify new threats or malicious behaviors.
The integration of observability solutions adds an essential layer of insight, acting as “artificial eyes” that detect and analyze behavioral changes—whether technological or human. This telemetry provides critical data for security teams to identify emerging threats undetected by traditional security tools.
By feeding this data into security systems, partners can enhance threat analysis, proactively isolate incidents, and mitigate risks before they escalate. Such proactive strategies position channel partners as trusted advisors in the cybersecurity space.
Q: How can channel partners align their business models with the increasing focus on sustainability and eco-friendly technology solutions?
A: There are two components for a partner to align their business model with the focus on sustainability and eco-friendly technology. Internally, the partners should invest in energy efficient solutions such as paperless documentation, cloud migration and green datacenters while promoting green initiatives such as utilizing recycled material and energy efficient office appliances. Externally, the partners would need to adopt by providing solutions to their customers that would help them contribute to the environment.
Observability solutions could help in providing the visibility on energy consumption by identifying unnecessary use of electrical power, e-waste management by identifying the components that really need to be replaced versus the ones that could be improved by simple modifications, carbon-tracking tools to help identify the devices that are polluting the environment the most and last but not least, promoting a remote workforce which would reduce the carbon emission caused by transportation and natural waste generated by humans moving from one place to the other. All of these initiatives among many more should be adopted.
Q: What role will hybrid cloud architectures and multi-cloud solutions play in channel strategies, and how can partners prepare for this evolution?
A: Hybrid architecture is efficient, but it comes with high risk of complication and chaos. The need to have proper observability tools to allow the partner to properly manage and observe the services in a multi-cloud environment or hybrid environment come as a ‘must to have’ technology. From experience, customers who adopted multi-cloud or hybrid architecture were not able to properly track their services, so it’s very hard to identify the issues and proactively act to avoid business interruptions. AI and ML in such architectures, play a major role to help the NOC team track their applications and provide necessary adjustments to the business.
