Swimming the Channel to the Edge in 2021

By Mike Olsen

Mike Olsen

For carriers and their channel partners, 2021 is a time to get creative. The 2021 planning season is driving home the fact that enterprises and midsized businesses will need to prioritize innovation due to pandemic challenges and budget restraints, just as they are realizing their existing IT plans will just not cut it going forward.

Crisis begets opportunity. Along those lines, 2021 represents a great opportunity for carriers and their channel partners to bring value, discuss sound ideas and plan new IT strategies for their clients in a turbulent time.

Because many of the legacy channel partner programs in place today were constructed in a previous phase of the industry, carriers will need to work closely with channel partners to help them move from a hardware-based legacy architecture to one that is defined by software and optimized by the cloud. Current legacy networks, as they stand, possess myriad bottlenecks, particularly in wide-area network (WAN) situations, slowing applications and opening them to security vulnerabilities.

To succeed, carriers will need to help channel partners accelerate pathways for their end-user customers to digitally transform operations and infrastructure to cut costs and grow faster once the world stabilizes. This empowers channel partners to lead with innovation and helps their customers leverage technology in the most optimal way. By taking the time to train channel partners on new technologies and IT architectures, for example, carriers will be better able to increase their agility and, at same time, their value to end-users.

Symbiotic Relationships Critical to Success

Relentless focus on customer value in the technology solutions space is necessary for channel partners, and so is their clarity of insight regarding their target. And it’s a symbiotic relationship. Carriers are looking for channel partners that have on-net opportunities, helping the carrier to position its full suite of business solutions.

Carriers can help partners meet the business needs of their customers with the right products and creative solutions. Good support means good connection. Connection means not only providing reliable communications services, but prioritizing the need to keep partners informed and well-supported within competitive service areas.

Transformative Partnerships

There is also the challenge of digital transformation. For carriers and channel partners, the ultimate transformation will bring customers closer to the business and open new sales opportunities. It’s unfortunately common that businesses become tied to ways of working that are counterintuitive to the goals of transformation, with attachment to outdated and inefficient technology.

Channel partners can help them get around this problem by presenting a clear business case for transformation that’s rooted in benefits. For example, cloud telephony made remote working possible and viable, even before the pandemic.

In a perfect world, transformation would be turnkey. Out with the old, in with the new. But this kind of complete infrastructure change rarely happens. Either way, the solutions being sold must be able to work with legacy, or adequately replace it. Digital transformation comes with myriad benefits. Businesses can …

… become more efficient, cost effective, flexible. But often, carriers will struggle to understand why they’re doing this whole transformation thing in the first place.

Also, if a business needs a reason to believe that transformation is the right thing for them, money talk always works. As much as 60% of all IT infrastructure will be on the cloud by the end of this year. And with the lower cost of ownership attached to that, transformation will always be a long-term money saver.

According to IDC, as the lines continue to blur between who is the customer and who is the partner, there will be a fundamental cultural shift where the ability to partner well will differentiate the leaders from the laggards. As complexity increases, customers will seek to work in tandem with specialized partners to achieve their specific business outcomes. All of this will lead to an ecosystem approach where partners need to behave differently than just acting as a supplier of technology  — they also need to be a partner in the outcomes.

IDC’s research suggests that edge spending will increase this year — and will be the majority of IT infrastructure by 2024. With this in mind, the partner opportunity is huge – and those partners who specialize in edge solutions will reap the benefits. Those solutions won’t just be hardware-based, but also will extend to data mining and analysis, thus addressing the whole solution.

To get to 2022, carriers need to accelerate pathways for their end-user customers to digitally transform operations and infrastructure to cut costs and grow faster, once the world stabilizes. This empowers channel partners to lead with innovation and helps their customers leverage technology in the most optimal way.

This is where the channel-carrier partnership can be invaluable. By using a carrier’s expertise to outline the business problems that can be solved with transformation, channel partners can become truly strategic partners, plowing resources into digital transformation, from legacy to digital to the edge.

Michael Olsen is senior vice president of commercial sales at Consolidated Communications. He is a veteran of the telecommunications/service provider industry with technical and business qualifications and a track record in strategic planning, business unit development and project management and sales strategies. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Minnesota State University in business education and accounting. You may follow him on LinkedIn or @CCI4Biz on Twitter.