Glass Half Full or Glass Half Empty? What’s Your Take?

If you’re involved in today’s IT channel you have likely adopted a rosier outlook, optimistic about the future even in the face of tremendous industry change. In fact, six in 10 channel firms expressed good vibes for the days and years ahead, according to CompTIA’s Fifth Annual State of the Channel research. That’s a far cry from five years ago when nervous VARs, solution providers and every other channel type huddled in conference rooms pondering possible extinction at the hands of cloud computing.

Today, ironically, cloud computing has been cited as the chief reason to be optimistic about the channel’s future, according to study respondents. It’s opening doors, they say. Whether or not there is reason to be this hopeful remains to be seen, but the channel is increasingly viewing cloud as less of a threat. For one, they are discovering that cloud isn’t a single business model, and as such the channel has the chance to plug in at various points: selling SaaS, integrating cloud with on-premises solutions, brokering and aggregating cloud options, application development, managed services and so on.

And yet, not everyone is cheering cloud on. Cloud remains a source of pessimism for a subset of respondents, particularly among those firms that sell to some small-end customers. To this customer demographic, cloud solutions offer a no-brainer alternative to on-premises hardware and software, the traditional bread and butter of small VARs’ portfolios. A third of channel firms cited the wider availability of purchase options along with customer self sufficiency as a source of concern for the channel’s future. This is forcing many of the smallest channel companies (firms with fewer than 10 employees) to rethink their value proposition. Case in point: 26 percent of them now report pure consulting services as their main source of revenue. If their end customers are going to go all cloud, these small VARs are going to carve out a role helping guide those decisions—or so goes the thinking.

All three of these market realities provide the channel a reason to be and a role to fill— if they take the appropriate steps. That means addressing skills gap issues within their ranks so they can focus on emerging and more sophisticated technologies. Training also extends to the business side of the house, including the need to revamp sales and marketing strategies to address different types of customers and fully embrace an “as-a-service” way of life.

There’s plenty to be optimistic about as the channel moves into the next several years. And the majority of firms are most definitely in a better headspace than five years ago. The question is: will it continue?

Carolyn April is CompTIA’s senior director of industry analysis.