A New Era of Distribution in the Cloud, Too

McBain also set his sights on the telco space, which he said used to have 25 master agents – now renamed tech solution brokers (TSBs). But with AppDirect’s recent acquisition of TBI, that figure has been whittled down to around five.

“They’re coming into the cloud, hot and heavy as well, as communication/collaboration is done from copper lines to the IT network.”

He also cited under-the-radar “aggregators” coming to the fore.

“We know that CDW and Insight have been big distributors for a long time. They’re just not talked about it that way. But when I worked at Lenovo and IBM for 17 years, they would have been my third or fourth biggest distributor globally. We just didn’t talk about it, but now we’re talking about it because they’re aggregating a lot of things.

“This is the new era of distribution in the cloud,” he added. “And these are partners we should all be considering and working with. Because there’s economics within each of these models that can pay us and can provide less friction for our clients.”