The Trends that Disrupted the Channel in 2017

2017 is almost a wrap and there’s no doubt about it — the channel is in the midst of a lot of disruption. And it’s happening on all sides — vendors, customers, distributors.

Just recently, Dell EMC appointed Joyce Mullen as channel chief, and many companies have named new top channel executives this year — Kony, Carbon Black, Pax8, SecurityFirst, Windstream, TierPoint, Infoblox, AT&T, Vonage, CloudJumper, Nitel, Avant and Veizon, to name a handful. HPE CEO Meg Whitman announced that she’ll be stepping down, and John Chambers, who gave up the reins as Cisco CEO in 2015, is now stepping down from company’s board.

Mergers and acquisitions are too numerous to mention, but on the distribution side, there was big news: Tech Data completed its acquisition of Avnet Technology Solutions and Synnex bought Westcon-Comstor.

We turned to industry watchers to get their take on significant partner-related industry news in 2017. Scroll through them in our gallery below.