Everything You Know About Partner Programs is Wrong
Everything You Know About Partner Programs is Wrong
CompTIA research explains why and what to do about it. Plus: ConnectWise defines platform, Atera goes “good crazy” on AI, and hackers discover brand management.
Hey, channel chiefs. Are you a glass half full or a glass half empty type?
If you’re in the glass half full camp, you’ll be pleased to know that partners are pretty happy with your channel programs, according to this year’s CompTIA State of the Channel report.
“Satisfaction rates have gone up,” said Carolyn April, the IT membership organization’s vice president of industry research, during an interview recorded last week at CompTIA’s ChannelCon event for an episode of the podcast I co-host.
If you’re more the glass half empty sort, though, you’ll probably be struck by the reason those rates are up: partners are participating in fewer programs.
Fewer, in fact, than at any point since CompTIA began asking members how many programs they belong to. For 11 years, the answer’s barely budged. “The sweet spot has been about nine to 10 programs,” April (pictured) says.
Then came this year’s survey. “We saw a pretty steep drop,” she notes. More specifically, the number of partners in 15 to 20 programs went way down and (as we reported earlier this year) the number in just one to four programs went way up. There appears to be a direct relationship, moreover, between those shifts on the one hand and those higher sat scores on the other.
“A lot of partners are happier working with fewer vendors,” April says. “They have more meaningful relationships. They’re probably making more money because they’re focusing very specifically on those particular vendors’ products and can dedicate some salespeople, dedicate the marketing, dedicate their technical folks, as opposed to trying to spread themselves thin over 20 different vendor relationships.”
Theoretically, though, all of that was true before this year. So why have so many partners suddenly discovered the rewards of juggling fewer vendor relationships? April cites three reasons with profound implications for vendors and partners alike:
1. Resale is dying. It’s not exactly news that selling stuff holds less appeal in the channel these days than selling services. VARs have been reinventing themselves, wholly or in part, as MSPs for a while. We may recently have hit a tipping point in that process, though.
“There are a lot of channel companies out there that don’t really sell products at all,” April says. “They’re focusing on the consulting work.” Which means they don’t need direct relationships with hardware manufacturers, for example, as much as they once did.
2. Marketplaces are thriving. When partners do sell products, moreover, it’s increasingly through a marketplace like those maintained by AWS and Microsoft. Though we’ll all have to wait a few months to learn precisely how much Canalys expects cloud marketplace spend to grow in the next five years, it’ll be “well north of 40% CAGR” and “inching towards $300 billion,” according to analyst Jay McBain.
“The vendor’s even more removed in the primarily cloud-based type of business model that we’re all kind of working in,” April observes. So why sink time and money into getting to know them?
3. Distributors are stepping up. Amazon and Microsoft aren’t the only companies with marketplaces, of course. D&H, Ingram Micro, Pax8, TD SYNNEX, and other distributors have them too, along with insights to share on the solutions those marketplaces contain.
“It’s impossible today for a partner, I believe, with the number of applications that are available on marketplaces to even scratch the surface of understanding who these vendors are,” notes April, adding that partners are leaning more heavily on distributors than ever before as a result.
“For a lot of channel companies, that’s the go-to relationship nowadays,” she says.
A level(er) playing field
Together, April continues, all three of those trends are producing a relative power shift from vendors to partners.
“For the first time in a long time, we see that the leverage is almost as much in the hands of the channel companies as it is the vendors,” she says. Partners once needed vendor relationships for discounts, sales assistance, and product training. Now vendors need to earn partner loyalty, in part by overhauling their partner programs.
“They’ve got to be rewritten, redeveloped, recreated,” April warns.
That begins with program requirements, which in an increasingly services-first world should skew toward measures like net new logos and renewal rates versus raw revenue totals. “They no longer want to be judged on the volume that they sell,” says April of partners.
The same logic extends to program benefits. Partners who sell services versus products don’t much value product education and collateral. “They want to learn how to run their business more effectively,” April says.
They also want guidance on combining products with services to form solutions. “Partners today are looking for vendors who can help provide a business outcome,” April says.
By extension, partners deprioritizing product sales should be open to re-thinking assumptions about what makes for a good vendor, she adds. “They might not be your enemy for selling direct anymore.”
Everyone’s thinking about channel relationships, in other words, could use a refresh. “The ecosystem is very much leveling out in terms of who holds the cards,” April says.
Atera rides the AI crazy train
Something Gil Pekelman, CEO of MSP software maker Atera, said during our conversation this week, reminded me of a fact so obvious as to be practically hidden in plain sight: pilots are people.
Which is to say that when Atera or Microsoft or various others in the industry liken their AI apps to copilots, they’re underscoring the uncanny way generative AI often appears to behave more like people than programming.
“It’s not software,” says an awed yet amused Pekelman (pictured) of genAI. Think of it instead like the crew of a spaceship that just landed in your backyard, he suggests.
“Two green men came out and said, ‘we are aliens, but we are here to work for you. Use us,’” Pekelman says. “That’s how the whole interaction feels.”
Fans of The Twilight Zone will recall that tales involving aliens who’ve come to serve man can have unhappy endings, but Pekelman sees nothing but upside ahead for now. “For me personally, in all my years in tech I’ve never gone through a period like this,” he says. “It’s crazy, but it’s good crazy.”
The latest stop on the crazy train for Atera came last week with the release of Copilot 2.0, a major update to the AI-powered RMM/PSA add-on we first told you about last December. Among other things, the new version adds Mac support as well as a feature that captures video of remote support sessions, converts it automatically into documentation, analyzes everything it sees in real time, and speaks up if it notices something unusual, like a technician accidentally deleting a file.
“It can immediately create an alert the second he does it more or less,” Pekelman says, noting that the system adds lessons learned during remote sessions to its training model as well to make diagnosing and addressing future support issues easier.
Functionality like that enables Copilot to accelerate ticket resolution by 10x on average, Atera says, and save technicians 11 to 13 hours a week. The system has an over 85% accuracy rate too, according to Pekelman.
“And when it’s not accurate, it doesn’t cause any harm,” he says. “You just will need to maybe continue discussing with it what you want to achieve,” much the way you refine other LLM prompts.
Atera’s still assessing the accuracy of Autopilot, the self-serve, fully autonomous Copilot counterpart that the vendor’s been beta testing for the last four-plus months. It’s done a pretty good job of understanding and addressing end user input so far, according to Pekelman, but the system won’t go GA until at least October anyway because Atera wants to gain a lot of experience massaging end user anxieties about trusting their devices and data to code instead of people.
“It’s going to be the first time that a user who is non-tech, who is afraid of technology actually, is going to solve his IT problems with AI and not with a human behind it,” Pekelman notes.
For all their skittishness, he adds, users have mostly appreciated the way Autopilot resolves their problems in minutes, versus the hours they might wait for a human tech simply to return their call.
And those human techs are proving to be Autopilot fans as well, according to Pekelman. “Just telling a Tier 1 engineer that you’re never going to have to reset a password again for somebody is like giving him his life back again,” he says. “He’s starting to do much more interesting things.”
Cybercrime spin doctors
Late last year, as I was distracted by holiday shopping and eggnog no doubt, Sophos published research I missed about a new technique in the unending quest to make cybercrime pay. Hackers, it seems, were attempting to weaponize…me.
Or people like me, rather, which is to say the media. Employing PR tactics exactly like those I encouraged vendors to use during a CompTIA ChannelCon session last week (and outlined as well in a recent podcast episode), cyber gangs were trying to publicize their exploits.
“They were literally releasing press releases,” says Chester Wisniewski (pictured), director of global field CTO at Sophos. “They thought that maybe if you had heard of them that you’d be cowering in fear, I guess.”
Whatever your opinion of the media, let’s at least acknowledge that this scheme, while creative, was a flop. “It must not have been effective at getting victims to pay, because we don’t really see them doing that anymore,” Wisniewski says.
According to a new study from Sophos posted this week, though, cyber gangs haven’t given up on PR altogether. Instead of relying on reporters to get their message out, however, they’re doing it themselves on dark web leak sites, and instead of trying to strike fear in victims they’re striving to inspire…gratitude.
The Cactus gang, for example, now describes itself online as a “Direct Security Audit Agency” performing a kind of public service by exposing lax vulnerability management by corporate IT departments and security vendors, according to the new report. Other gangs call their targets “irresponsible,” “negligent,” or uncaring, and encourage downstream victims to pressure companies responsible for their data being stolen into paying up, us-against-them style.
“Typically, in the context of exposing security weaknesses and negligence, ransomware operators portray themselves as morally superior to their targets,” the new study adds. “The Malas ransomware gang, for example, demands that its victims ‘make a donation to a nonprofit of their choice.’”
Cybercriminals, in other words, have discovered brand management. We’re not parasites, they’re saying. We’re crusaders against corporate greed.
Wisniewski suspects they’ll be disappointed by the impact of these efforts should they ever end up in a courtroom. “I don’t think the judge will go easy on them because they wanted to play Robin Hood,” he says.
And to be clear, Wisniewski continues, threat actors are not caped crusaders, regardless of what their publicity says and as any number of recent headlines makes abundantly clear. They are, however, undeniably relentless.
“No matter what we do to confront them, they’re back five minutes later with something else,” Wisniewski says. “They just keep coming back and coming back and coming back.”
ConnectWise says it’s time for platform
I listed three important channel trends early in this post, but missed a fourth that I’ve discussed before specifically in the context of security products. Partners looking to do more business with fewer vendors are leaning away from stand-alone point solutions toward integrated, multi-function platforms.
ConnectWise, it turns out, has noticed the shift toward platforms as well. “We strongly believe that given the maturity of the MSP market and the advent of hyperautomation, generative AI, and RPA, that now is the time for platform,” said Angus Robertson (pictured), the company’s CMO, during a ChannelCon conversation last week.
“Platform”, however, is one of those words that different people use in different ways. ConnectWise defines it as a mix of shared UI, shared orchestration, shared RPA and AI engines, and shared foundational services (think user authentication, alerts, and the like). So does IDC, based on a ConnectWise-sponsored report the analyst published last Wednesday that calls out an additional platform component right in the title: unified data.
Not coincidentally, that’s been a fundamental part of Asio, the next-generation platform that powers a growing share of ConnectWise’s portfolio, since it first appeared on drawing boards late in the last decade, according to Raghu Ram Bongula, the vendor’s CTO.
“When Asio was envisioned multiple years ago, having a common data layer was something we thought through as an important need, because having that you can derive analytics,” he explains. Since then and less expectedly, he adds, it’s also proved to be all but indispensable to hyperautomation, something ConnectWise is betting on heavily.
Unified data is critical as well to another strategic initiative at ConnectWise aimed at making Asio a platform that both ConnectWise solutions and third-party products can share.
“That single pane of glass,” Robertson says. “We almost don’t dare say it anymore, but that’s the goal in terms of usability and that automation and making sure that MSPs can grow profitably.”
Including the enormous MSPs I’ve written about recently just now beginning to appear. According to Bongula, ConnectWise is ready for them.
“We have elasticity built in,” he says of Asio, “so we can linearly scale to whatever point our cloud provider allows us.”
Also worth noting
N-able has added support for Windows 365 to its Cloud Commander SaaS management tool.
Rewst has raised a cool, fresh $45 million. More on this next week.
SaaS Alerts now integrates with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. More on that next Friday too.
It was a big week for SentinelOne, which added AI, cloud, endpoint, and identity features to its Singularity Platform.
It also rolled out a Singularity Platform edition specifically for SMBs.
And an MDR solution.
And an alliance agreement with Google’s Mandiant Consulting unit.
Speaking of alliances, managed security Vijilan now has one with data management vendor Cribl.
And TD SYNNEX has one with SIEM vendor Securonix.
Mega MSP alert: Fulcrum IT Partners (which I’ve written about a time or two) has acquired Fortress Security Risk Management.
Trend Micro might be for sale.
Fortinet bought data loss prevention specialist Next DLP.
Private equity investor EQT bought a majority stake in Acronis.
Peter Mahoney is the new chief commercial officer at GoTo. Nicholas Asadorian is the new (interim) CFO.
Paul Aronhime is the new SVP of federal sector at Keeper Security.
Apple MDM vendor Jamf has a new global partner program.
Former Salesforce growth evangelist and multi-title author Tiffani Bova is the new chief of strategy and research at The Futurum Group. Hoping to mine her wealth of knowledge in a post coming soon.
Non-profit group Tech4Change has a new board.