Channel Futures Leadership Summit: 11 Takeaways and the Week in Pictures

The second annual Channel Futures Leadership Summit, held this week in Miami Beach, Florida, is a wrap.

Partners, supplier and distributor representatives, analysts and media packed the Fontainebleau Hotel for three days of keynotes, networking and more. The event also featured the MSP Summit, with conference education sessions dedicated specifically to managed service providers, and the Women's Leadership Summit, which brought more than two-dozen women to the keynote stage with messages of empowerment and getting ahead in business, to name a couple.

The Leadership Summit also included the biggest awards night in the channel. The Channel Futures MSP 501 gala welcomed this year's winners for a dinner and recognition for their accomplishments over the past year.

Education, as always, was the hallmark of the Channel Futures event. For instance, it furthered the conversation about the relationship between the managed IT service provider (MSP) and technology advisor (agent) communities. Many vendors and technology services distributors who may have only traditionally worked with agents in past are looking to find joint opportunities with MSPs.

Kristy Thomas, vice president, partner experience and enablement at Intelisys, said "bridging that gap" requires careful research around how MSPs, VARs and TAs – and everything in between – operate differently.

"I think that there is a tremendous amount of opportunity for the MSPs (if technology service distributors want to focus on that) in today's marketplace, for additional value-add services that they could source and layer beyond just the services they offer the marketplace," Thomas told Channel Futures. "At the very beginning, it's about building a programmatic approach that understands your partners and the value that they bring so that we can provide that adjacency to their customers."

See our slideshow above for more of the highlights from the keynote stage and conference education sessions you might have missed at the Channel Futures Leadership Summit. It includes some of the biggest takeaways from the event by our Channel Futures editors.