CHANNEL PARTNERS CONFERENCE & EXPO — A $7 million monthly recurring deal sounds pretty nice, right?

Clarify360’s Jo Peterson

One channel partner took part in such a transaction with a hospital, according to Jo Peterson, vice president of cloud services for Clarify 360.

Peterson shared lucrative  opportunities with partners Wednesday afternoon in her keynote presentation “3 Cutting-Edge Techs That Bleed Green” at the Channel Partners Conference & Expo.

Peterson spoke about figuring out the “The Next Cloud.” For her, one shining example of the next cloud is “Empowered Edge,” or more simply put, the internet of things (IoT).

One of the biggest goldmines for IoT is the health care vertical, where tele-health allows hospitals and doctors to observe their patients’ vitals from afar. Many medical institutions are rushing to obtain remote patient monitoring (RPM) technology as they face fines for excessively readmitting Medicare patients. Add to that the government reimbursing institutions for RPM services, and you’ve got high demand.

According to Peterson, partners likely don’t have to look far for this opportunity.

“You all probably have a customer in your base today that is in the health care vertical that you can talk to about this,” she said. “Better yet, the target audience is not IT. It’s business people. It’s the CEO, the CFO, the chief medical officer. And why do they want to have a conversation with you? Because they want to avoid risk.”

In addition to high demand, the market isn’t terribly well penetrated. Avant Communication‘s recent “State of Disruption Survey” showed health care trailing manufacturing and financial services in terms of digital transformation progress.

Avant’s Drew Lydecker

Avant President Drew Lydecker called health care an “insane laggard in many areas,” despite the fact that the industry is investing in tech at a heavy rate and striving to modernize “as fast as humanly possible.”

“We’re working on a few of the largest hospitals in the world right now, taking them fro mthe dark ages of their phone system into unified communications,” Lydecker said. “But it’s so difficult to do. They are so complicated that it’s not an easy market to just get into and penetrate.”

Peterson mentioned in her keynote that partners who integrate AI into their offerings could gain a foothold on the competition. Voice in particular is a key integration area, as Peterson said that voice is the next human-to-computer interface. Think Alexa and Siri.

She said customer’s lives will become easier as the AI gets smarter and deeper.

“It increases the ability to lessen the need for human interaction,” she said. “The last thing they want to do is spend their time or their team’s time looking at log files.”

She closed by encouraging partners to think outside of the IT stack.

“I want you to be bold. I want you to be creative. I want you to think about solving business problems for your clients,” she said.