1 Everything as a service Lily Lazarevski, Senior Global Channel Marketing Manager, Infoblox: “With the ongoing industry shift to XaaS and revenue spread over a longer period, more subscription deals are needed to equal the pre-Xaas revenue and mitigate churn. For channel marketers, this means more marketing is needed to fill the funnel faster as we look to greater collaboration with our partners to help increase awareness and reach and drive pipeline velocity in a noisy marketplace.”
James Houselander, Senior Manager, EMEA Channel Marketing, HPE Aruba: “There is a huge amount of transformation going on because the cloud is now de facto. It’s a true solution sell, and partners are having to transform to market, sell and service these solutions. The knock-on effect is widespread across the channel – more personnel movement, a different skill requirement and a focus on a customer- centric strategy.”
2 More collaborative ecosystems
Lily Lazarevski, Senior Global Channel Marketing Manager, Infoblox: “This year there will need to be greater ecosystem collaboration to create coverage and scale for complex solutions. As
XaaS grows, partners are increasingly challenged to master the variety of technologies required by their customers. Success will require the entire partner ecosystem to work in a matrixed model to create, sell and market comprehensive solutions that deliver customer value.”
Barnaby Wood, EMEA Product Management, Veritas Technologies: “This will increasingly drive channel marketers to get hands-on and do a bit of everything. The internal ecosystems around channel GTM are not robust. We need to focus on increasing our alignment with sales, educating the entire business on ‘why channel marketing’, and making the whole process more collaborative and effective.”
Colleen Fogerty, Global Head of Partner and Ecosystem Marketing, Atos Tech Foundations: “What Atos does well are huge, complex, secure, and often highly confidential IT projects. So, taking a small piece of this solution and a small part of that and running lots of little partner campaigns is just a bit boring and less compelling. It also doesn’t differentiate us. This is why we need to shift from partner-by-partner in 2023 to ecosystem marketing. We need to communicate collectively about what differentiates us from our competitors – this is what ecosystem partner marketing is all about.”
Jon Collins, VP of Research at independent analyst firm GiGaOm:
“The technology landscape continues to fragment and is only going to become more dynamic. Only by working together can providers, suppliers and partners keep ahead of the game. As point products merge into platforms, end-user businesses will have to tackle the resulting waves of integration, management and cross-platform service provision, and will need all the help they can get.”
3 Sustainability
Jon Collins, VP of Research at independent analyst firm GiGaOm: “Sustainability and broader ESG don’t have to be seen as a cost; there’s value to be had in how a business addresses the needs of its stakeholders and how that translates into benefits across the board, from brand equity to bottom-line impact. Measurability is key, so it’s important that channel organisations see a role for impactful sustainability, rather than in marketing alone.”
James Houselander, Senior Manager, EMEA Channel Marketing, HPE Aruba: “There isn’t a single ‘right’ solution to addressing sustainability and ESG issues, so as well as being a key trend, this is going to be a challenge in 2023. For channel marketers, getting to grips with compliance and then using that to help drive competitive advantage could make a real difference.”
Rob Reynolds, Head of Field Marketing EMEA & GSI, International Marketing, Verizon Business Group: “We’re now at an action stage – it’s got to be about more than just good intentions or strategy with no substance. Businesses must align their strategy to sustainability and be actively pursuing ESG targets if they want to generate value.”
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