CHANNEL PARTNERS CONFERENCE & EXPO — Newcomers to the channel are descending upon Las Vegas this week.

An AT&T-sponsored First-Time Attendee Reception welcomed businesses that are looking for education and partnerships around digital services.

Of the 6,000-plus participants at this year’s conference, 39 percent are attending for the first time. This year’s conference is seeing a 12 percent year-over-year increase in overall attendees from 2017. The MSP, VAR and integrator categories increased by 21 percent year-over-year.

Stephen Garrett works for Royal Marketing Group Corporation, a reseller that has come to the conference to learn about new technologies and find more ways to get residual earnings.

“We’ve been doing commercial and residential on a smaller scale, and we wanted to step it up,” he told Channel Partners.

Jim Poull serves as vice president of sales for Chicago Consolidated Communications (CCC Technologies), a partner of Avaya, Cisco, Fortinet and other vendors. Poull says trade shows rarely present vendor-neutral education and keynote sessions, but he found Tuesday’s education sessions at the Business Success Symposium (BSS) preconference – particularly Mark Smith’s “Profitably Pivoting to Embrace New Business Models” talk – to be unbiased.

“The content today at no point talked about who’s better,” he said.

Christina Mastriona works as strategic account director for SaleScout, a Colorado-based provider of sales and marketing intelligence. She says she is at the conference to see her partners.

“I’m here to support them and make sure things are working,” she said.

The Channel Partners Conference & Expo continues Wednesday. Read Edward Gately’s recap from the Tuesday afternoon BSS keynote, featuring SADA Systems.