Posted by Mike Fitch on Sep 10, 2021
What’s Happening: Modern Adaptation = High Growth
Digital transformation initiatives have been prevalent for the majority of the last decade, but never more so than right now. The COVID-19 pandemic has served as a catalyst for the increased pressure to speed up digital transformation adoption, with an overnight increase in IT demand for remote workforces, distance learning and more prolific digital customer experiences.
Staying stagnant is not an option and companies that are are reducing the digital gap by adapting to transformation are seeing quicker returns. It’s also not specific to any one industry; whether it’s retail, finance, manufacturing, technology, transportation, healthcare or distribution — plans to digitize are being dramatically sped up by the pandemic.
According to Forrester, who recently organized a digital business maturity study, showed that organizations considered “advanced” were twice as likely to rely on services partners to accelerate digital practices than their “beginner” counterparts. In addition, advanced firms were also far more likely to use digital transformation to drive revenue, compared to beginning firms who were more likely to use it to reduce costs.
By the Numbers: Digital Transformation Spend
Kevin Kennedy, senior vice president and strategic advisor of Advanced Solutions at TD SYNNEX has experience leading both the Edge Solutions and Advanced Solutions business at legacy Tech Data for a number of years. This dual layer of experience helped provide visibility into the level of connectivity between the entire IT ecosystem. In our last interview with Kevin, he shared insights on the value of edge, and we captured additional insight on where the channel opportunity lies:
“The opportunity to provide our customers end-to-end solutions is immense,” said Kevin. “All of the hard work and the details that go into putting together a data center, you’re going to want your sales force and the rest of your colleagues to be able to access that information regardless of where they sit, especially in this work-from-home environment where individuals are distributed across the world. One way to do this is through edge devices. There are two elements to have full edge connectivity: the device itself where you’re accessing the data and the ability to get on the network regardless of where you sit. Our opportunity to truly build end-to-end solutions by leveraging our integration centers and global services capabilities is tremendous.”
I look at the edge today with my Advanced Solutions perspective and see opportunity, opportunity, opportunity.
Market Insights: The Future Opportunity with Edge and Next-Gen
For individuals or organizations that have relied on traditional storage and processing of data through the cloud or as data center customers, edge represents an excellent opportunity. Instead of only focusing on the data center technology itself, now channel partners can ask questions that matter to their customers, such as:
By doing so, that’s going to help you start to frame a conversation around where edge solutions and its technology can start to come into play. Most customers are going to have a workforce with mobile phones, laptops and network requirements. The obvious opportunity is to go sell that infrastructure, but more importantly, to also build a services capability around both the data center and edge component, which presents a huge business opportunity for our channel partners.
Adding the services component is going to create a monthly or annual revenue stream once realized and it’s going to be repeatable. There’s a new opportunity to upgrade and refresh all of those devices. The chance to open a dialog with traditional data center partners into really creating the end-to-end solutions and then wrapping all that with managed services represents a profitable addition to their business that they may not be taking advantage of today.
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To wrap, between the COVID-19 pandemic forcing organizations into an accelerated digital transformation timeline, and IoT-connected devices growing at an astounding rate, it’s a great time to be in tech, where the market opportunity is rewarding innovation and adaptation.
