Ultimate Power Panel

There simply is no place in the industry where the most powerful technology executives leading the indirect sales channel will appear on the same stage to discuss the channel’s future. This group of leaders spoke about the importance of the entire channel, which is growing in complexity by the day. Tyler Bryson of Microsoft, Danny Jenkens of ThreatLocker, Chris Jones of AT&T and Andrew Sage of Cisco were united on one main point: The channel is growing in importance to their organizations with senior leaders and boards of directors pressing for more growth.

Jones (third from left, above) in particular talked about the importance of the channel focusing on small businesses.

“Small business is where the opportunity is,” he said. “They’re willing to take risks because they don’t have a big, embedded infrastructure. SMBs are entrepreneurs … and there are a lot more of them. A lot of SMBs add up to a large business. If you lose a big business, it’s detrimental. But if you lose a small business, there’s another small business out there.”

“The small and midsize customers are going through this incredible transformation right now,” said Sage, (second from right, above). “SaaS/cloud is opening up opportunities to deploy technology that they never had. They don’t have to buy servers or licenses, or people to install in broom closets. So they’re moving fast and they’re consuming technology at an incredible pace, and this is driving everything … and our company is paying attention to that.”