Tim Curran is retiring from the Global Technology Distribution (GTDC), which he has headed since 2002. In this edition of the Channel Futures podcast, Curran looks back over his long career, which began at Panasonic selling dot-matrix printers.

After building Panasonic’s printer business into a $1 billion company, Curran accepted a job as senior vice president of sales at Tech Data. There, he enjoyed even bigger sales growth. While at the company, Tech Data sales climbed from $3 billion to almost $12 billion.

GTDC’s Tim Curran

From Tech Data, Curran moved to the GTDC. At the time, the trade council was losing money and suffering from an identity crisis. Curran immediately set out to improve the group’s reputation and better define its mission. He launched new research projects, expanded the group internationally and persuaded top industry executives to get directly involved with the GTDC.

Today, the organization’s reports on tech trends, vendor programs and financing are among the most widely read in the industry. (Here you can download a copy of the 2018 Tech Distribution Outlook from the GTDC.)

Curran, who received an undergraduate degree from the University of Notre Dame and a masters and Ph.D. from Columbia University, plans to spend a good chunk of his retirement teaching near his home at the University of South Florida-St. Petersburg.

When asked how he would characterize the state of distribution today, Curran took a deep breath and said, “undergoing transition.”

But don’t count distributors out, he adds.

Despite their size and reliance on product sales, Curran says distributors have demonstrated agility time and again when faced with an existential threat. The cloud, while very challenging, is merely the latest in a long series of market transitions.

“When I teach, I look at the students and ask whenever there is an issue, ‘Is this good or bad?’ The cloud has been a challenge. But I think some of the big guys like Ingram and Tech [Data] are overcoming the challenge and are now successful in the cloud,” Curran says.

Kaseya’s Fred Voccola

When he looks ahead to 2019 and beyond, the cloud, he adds, is poised to be a big driver of growth after a period of uncertainty.

From the GTDC and Curran, we turn to Kaseya, which made news recently with its acquisition of IT Glue. In an interview, Kaseya CEO Fred Voccola takes a moment to share his thoughts on 2019. In our interview, Voccola addresses speculation that his market segment – IT infrastructure management software – will begin to consolidate in 2019. Don’t bet on it, he says.

If you’d like to be a guest on an upcoming episode or have a comment, drop me a line at [email protected].

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As always, thanks for tuning in.