What a year this has been!! The new wave of winners comprised of organizations that have harnessed the megatrends of social, cloud, mobile and big data to their advantage. As predicted, 2015 has been a defining year for cloud as private cloud began to give way to hybrid cloud with partners embracing it by skilling up to meet the demands of their customers.
This has also redefined channel distribution dynamics to deliver greater profitability to its channel partners. Flash has emerged as a strong product and is soon to take charge in the storage space.
Hyper converged infrastructure tried to find its feet in 2015 with many vendors launching products globally and this will make its mark in the coming years. For enterprises and partners, these trends gave rise to customer expectations for better, faster, newer service with no downtime. The next wave of IT partners, vendors and enterprises will need to thrive and conquer the digital peak to meet the new age customer demands.
In such a scenario, partners need options, support and resources to continue to succeed in the current marketplace while also adapting to and thriving in this next generation of IT. Some of the trends that partners must look out for in the upcoming year are:
1. Realign Suppliers and Partners
By 2020, more than 30% of the IT vendors will not exist as we know them today requiring realignment of preferred vendor relationships. The new technologies, offerings, business models, competitors, partners, and buyers in the emerging Digital economy are putting tremendous pressure on traditional IT suppliers. They are also accelerating some new players to market leadership roles. Over the next several years, we will see non-stop shifts in vendor fortunes, with almost one-third of today’s leading suppliers acquired, merged, downsized, or significantly repositioned. Partners with the right skillsets will be needed to take on custom, on-premise consulting-based initiatives and also hybrid cloud deployments. The partner networks will re-align with enterprises preferring partners that are leaders in the 3rd Platform and Digital at scale marketplace, even as new entrants disrupt, traditional players consolidate, and critical capabilities shift.
2. The New Digital Economy
Digital based start-ups in every industry will have much greater importance for enterprises, partners, suppliers etc. They can come to market faster and scale faster, than ever before. They will be key members of industry cloud platforms’ innovation communities. Leaders will embed digital into all parts of the business, harmonize virtual and human experiences, and be able to rapidly shift to meet the hyper-adoption/ hyper-abandonment behavior of customers. While the traditional enterprises are all migrating their organizations to the Digital 3rd Platform, they are also providing you and their other partners an opportunity for higher profitability and deliver better customer satisfaction. To stay in the game, partners will need to upskill for the growing Digital Economy.
3. Traditional companies stand up to disruptors
The empire strikes back in 2016. Traditional leaders will take advantage of their powerful points of differentiation — market footprint, capital and massive amounts of customer data. Channel Partners will need to shed cumbersome annual processes for agile ones that can work at the pace of dynamic customers and disruptors. According to research firm Gartner Inc, India’s IT market is projected to grow annually at a rate of 4.95% between 2015 and 2019—the fastest globally—to touch $85.3 billion by the end of 2019. The IT budget in India is predicted to increase at a huge 11.7% making it the highest in the world. This is a massive opportunity for our channel community.
4. Customer Centricity is the new bar
The level and quality of contextual, personalized experiences will be a key determinant of who wins mindshare and share of wallet. It is essential to Integrate data and information flows across the customer life-cycle to enhance relationships and increase customer value. Re-architect marketing, sales, service, and delivery capabilities to support thousands of times as many customers as you do today or more and to, paradoxically, do so with even greater customer intimacy. We must provide a framework for more effectively dealing with customer data, processes, and interactions to improve customer relationships and increase customer lifetime value. CIOs will aggressively rationalize and streamline the core IT landscape to make room for and rapidly grow investment in business technology and leaders will evolve loyalty programs to work with their customers, fundamentally changing the meaning and strength of affinity. This means that as a channel partner, your relationship with your customer will need to be based on personalization and context — and your investments need to reflect that and create this affinity.
5. Software- defined enterprises
This is a continuing trend from 2015 and in this year, we will see this move from a ‘good to have’ to a ‘must have’ on the channel priorities. Software-defined storage (SDS) , Software Defined networking (SDN) and software-defined data center (SDDC) are gaining traction with increasing inquiries coming in from customers focusing on scalable data centers and mobility. Indian market is enthusiastic about the technology and this trend cannot be missed by Indian enterprise channel partners.