Channel Partner Best Practices: Flexibility, Stability, Consolidation

The COVID-19 pandemic has created uncertainties for virtually every business in every industry. Technology channel partners are no exception. They’ve had to adapt to a new, less personal way of doing business. For example, replacing in-person handshakes with Zoom calls and lunches with UberEats. More than ever, customers are looking to their partners to help navigate these trying times. To do this, channel partner best practices are warranted.

While technology partners’ futures are dependent on a lot of factors outside of their control, there are steps they can take to ride out the pandemic and position themselves to capitalize by solving the most complex challenges their customers face of reducing the risk, cost and complexity of their most important asset – their information. They can do what channel partners do best, that is serve as trusted advisers. Partners become extensions of their customers’ business and help guide customers to a future where technology tools adapt to serve customers’ needs.

Here are a few channel partner best practices to deploy heading into 2021.

Focus on Solutions, Not Infrastructure Upgrades

While this trend has been in play for a while, the pandemic is making solutions development more of a priority. Customers are looking more closely at every expense. For example, they’re prioritizing moves that drive value over investments in newer, more feature-packed infrastructure components. That is leading partners to opportunities to create additional revenue and profit from stacking solutions, including services. The extra due diligence will force partners to structure upgrades as targeted investments aimed at addressing specific business problems.

This plays to channel partners’ strengths. While customers want best-of-breed components, integrations are complicated — and if partners can package total solutions, offering services and best practices, they can do a better job meeting customers’ needs.

Solutions are becoming more critical in deals involving storage technology. For years, buying storage was all about building capacity and performance. Adding more servers means you can house and process more data. Now, with data playing a more indispensable role in digital transformations and having to be always on, companies need more nimble and accessible storage to quickly deliver for applications. Storage solutions are required to integrate into apps like Splunk for heavy-duty analysis that supports informed decision making within an organization. Channel partners that deliver an integrated package — blending together software, network and storage in support of the application stack — can help customers scale their business and solve problems across their IT organizations.

Ride the Consolidation Wave

Data center consolidation will continue to be a huge focus for technology customers in 2020 and well into 2021. This is nothing new. Cloud adoption has accounted for some of the change, with organizations offloading servers and shifting workloads to public, private and hybrid clouds. But it goes beyond that. Customers are looking to manage storage systems more efficiently, both on-premises and in the cloud, and they’re looking for solutions that can streamline their processes.

It’s all about simplifying their business – doing more with less. This applied prior to the pandemic, and now, with companies looking for cost savings, platform consolidation is at the top of their lists.

That means channel partners will need to help customers pursue consolidation strategies. This could spur partners to enable heavier use of containers, virtual machines (VMs) or smart storage systems. The goal is to shrink the number of platforms they need to use and make the platforms easier to manage. Rather than having multiple disparate storage systems, for example, create a …