The CP List: 20 Tech Channel Thought Leaders You Should Know

Jo Peterson

Clarify360’s Jo Peterson

Jo Peterson, vice president of cloud services at Clarify360 and Cloud Girls‘ co-founder, said market consolidation from a vendor perspective is “white hot.” Cloud Girls’ new focus is on thought leadership.

“As big companies get even bigger, adding to their internal sales teams and treating partners as competition, it’s important to ensure that your contracts provide as much protection as possible,” she said. “Creating and maintaining direct relationships with key vendor leadership is also imperative in this quickly changing landscape.”

We’re also seeing a shift in customer buying patterns to “total, often complex solutions instead of point products,” Peterson said.

“The market is shifting to online buying due to convenience and expediency,” she said. “According to 2112’s Channel Chief Outlook report, 11 percent of channel executives expect the majority of their revenue to come through automated digital sales by 2023. Channel partners must continue to drive value for clients around tools, analysis, integration, implementation and the expertise they bring to the table.”

Marc McClure

Marc McClure, Tech Data’s senior vice president of U.S. commercial sales, said the pace of innovation around cloud feature sets and cloud infrastructure creates “one of the best opportunities for the channel that we have seen since the onset of managed services.”

Tech Data’s Mark McClure

“In an era when many felt that cloud would disintermediate the traditional IT provider, we are seeing the opposite effect,” he said. “As end companies are transitioning their infrastructure over to multicloud environments in order to create platforms from which to launch their digital-transformation initiatives, we are also witnessing a rapid increase in cloud features being created by hyperscale cloud providers like AWS and Azure. Identifying and mapping the features that make the most sense for those end companies is no simple task. As such, this challenge represents a tremendous opportunity for consultative engagements from solution providers to not only help identify which features make the most sense (driven by needs ranging from workload types to vertical applications), but also an opportunity for workload prioritization, planning and migration services.”

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