As we near the end of 2021, one thing is certain — continued change. The global pandemic has forced businesses to significantly adapt how they operate and how/where their employees work, prompting massive technological transformation across the board. For channel partners, this has led to a new level of service requirements as they help businesses navigate, survive, and thrive in this new reality. Over the past two years, we’ve seen the role of channel partners evolve from traditional technology consultants to something closer to “business consultants” to address this need.

Looking ahead, will channel partners play a greater role in the channel ecosystem in 2022? Will we continue to see a blurring of the lines around what a technology consultant’s role should be? Where do we expect growth and investment?

With these questions in mind, I wanted to share my thoughts, as well as those from Citrix Channel Partners, on a few key trends and developments you can expect in 2022 and beyond.

Transformation of the Channel Ecosystem

In 2022, we expect to see the channel ecosystem itself undergoing transformation. Channel partners will continue to evolve and empower customers across their environment vs. focusing in on one specialty. This broadening will offer customers an optimized experience while creating new levels of opportunity and involvement for channel partners. To increase their chances for success in this environment, channel partners will need to offer both a variety of technology solutions and deep expertise within the areas most valued by customers.

“The channel ecosystem will change with the reality of the new normal,” said Edwin Boon, CEO of Shellsoft. “Channel recruitment will not be face to face and may be more automated, channel networking could be down 50 percent, and traditional channel partners who are not comfortable with the cloud or subscription model will struggle to survive.”

Prashanth Subramanian, Co-Founder and Director, Quadrasystems, added, “The channel needs to up the game — customers are rapidly moving from testing the waters with cloud adoption to maturing their infrastructure and applications through cloud-native technologies. Traditional engagement models need to evolve for this agile world where no one is at rest — our customers, nor their end customers. IP solutions and frameworks will help build scale, address new markets and above all, help customers to accelerate outcomes.”

Increased Focus on Security

As we continue to witness the disastrous impacts of high-profile security breaches, global businesses are being forced to continuously quantify the risk of a cybersecurity attack and take a more aggressive and proactive security approach. However, this must not impede on the employee experience, but should instead bolster it; the need for a great employee experience has never been more important.

“Security products have a lot of interest,” said Paul Kunze, VP, Sales & Marketing, IntraSystems. “Many businesses brought on multiple products during the past two years to accommodate their newly distributed workforce and they all need to be secured. Once a week, we have a new customer or client that has been attacked with ransomware. Customers are coming to us and asking us to take over infrastructure and provide managed security solution. That’s going to be more prominent next year.”

“Security will become foundational to any discussion, and it needs to be the first item on the drawing board when designing an enterprise architecture,” Subramanian said.

Boon echoed the emphasis on security and specifically pointed to the importance of zero trust. “Zero trust is here to stay. No single customer could conceivably block all threats, which is why I believe the cloud infrastructure companies (Amazon, Microsoft, and Google to a lesser degree) will continue to see growth, as they provide a solid layer of security for their platforms, and the customers just need to focus on security solutions that complement them.”

The Rise of the Marketplace

To address the need for diverse offerings, we expect to see further adoption and engagement around marketplaces as a strategic initiative. Marketplaces provide vendors and channel partners a lower-cost way to enter new markets while enabling them to deliver increased value to customers. As we see the continued development of marketplaces in 2022, more businesses will be able to explore a variety of offerings while reducing the cost and complexity that comes with traditional channel sales.

“With the rise of the marketplace, the purpose of a channel partner will transition from a vendor-specific trusted advisor to an ecosystem orchestrator,” Kunze said. “Transitioning from ‘legacy resell’ to a partner-empowered ecosystem orchestration model is critical to customer retainment as well as growth of our overall business. As a partner-empowered ecosystem orchestrator, the partner has deeper engagement in the customer’s core business and a vested interest in maximizing information technology operations across all platforms — such as cloud, infrastructure, and solution purchasing. Product resell profitability will be replaced with Partner of Record (PAR) enabled and adoption payouts. Moreover, professional services will be elevated to Virtual C-Level advisory services combined with managed service offerings to coincide with IT contractual agreements.”

Remote and Hybrid Workforces

In 2022, we expect to see “elastic work” expectations, meaning that everyone wants the same experience no matter where they are. The question will be how we improve that experience whether its logging in remotely or integrating information within different applications to create a more intelligent response.

“In the discussions I’m having with other CXOs, the consensus is that the workplace will not be the same after COVID-19. With that said, it will still be extremely important to work with building a team mindset, culture within the company and make employees feel like they are welcome and at home when visiting the offices,” said Linus Lindström, Owner & CEO, Xenit AB, and Adam Clark, Solution Architect, Xenit AB. “The ‘Way of Working’ at workplaces will need to develop and be customized to the new way of life and work. If technology made a leap ‘thanks’ to COVID-19, the same will now happen with internal processes and other functions at companies.”

“A lot of enterprises planned for back to work early this year, only to have to walk it back. Investment in technology will depend on how the customers treat the new normal, and as of now, the new normal is all fuzzy as far as the workplace is concerned,” Boon said. “These will be here to stay. There will be a lot less corporate travel. Conferences may return to pre-pandemic, but the intracompany or regional visits could decline by as much as 75 percent post pandemic.”

For more on my 2022 predictions as well as a deeper dive into those listed above, please visit my recent VMBlog article Citrix 2022 Predictions: The Role of Channel Partners in The Future of Digital Transformation.