The channel must focus on helping its customers make their businesses more connected, resilient and productive.

That’s according to Miriam Murphy, SVP at Tech Data Advanced Solutions. Murphy says organisations are reflecting on changes to their businesses, their supply chains and the competitive landscape.

Tech Data’s Miriam Murphy

“End customers have new and urgent business requirements that need to be met, as well as pre-pandemic concerns,” she said. “Many are also facing changed competitive landscapes, due to more agile competitors. [They have] used the disruption to speed up their own digitalisation, enhance their customer value proposition and gain market share.

“The pandemic accelerated digitalisation,” she said. “We all saw the importance of keeping a remote workforce connected. [This was] along with the need to be highly focused on aiding collaboration and driving productivity.”

Murphy believes data represents the key to accelerating innovation for customers.

“Partners that will see the greatest success know how to leverage their customers’ data to drive transformative business growth. They will also know how to create highly resilient and productive business platforms based on hybrid cloud environments. Plus, they will encase solutions with modern cybersecurity.”

The exec said partners will also look to distributors like Tech Data to help. They want “to de-risk new initiatives, lower barriers and make next-generation technology more accessible,” she said.

Staying Productive

With the UK implementing strict COVID-19 response measures this Christmas, more people are working from home once again. Murphy says Tech Data has been heavily focused on “staying connected and productive.”

She explained: “How can we work with partners and vendors on solutions that really optimise productivity no matter what environment we’re working in? Our teams have been building solutions that can be very quickly taken to market to support all of those areas.”

Murphy also says partners are thinking about how to maximise revenue and margin opportunities.

“That can come in the form of new sales opportunities, but also being able to optimise the cost to deliver that in the market. We have far more partners working with us on our services portfolio than we have in the past. They are leveraging our cloud platform, our software store — which allows for direct management of licences.

“The speed at which we were able to enable and pivot our teams throughout this has been tremendous. And we will continue to work in that mode for as long as you know our partners need us to.”