technologyreseller.co.uk 33 influence the buying decision, because they’re partnering with a partner or they’re a consultant. It’s very important they don’t see us just as a distributor but as a solution aggregator as well. TR: Do you see any problems on the horizon that could make business difficult for you in 2026? DW: The big questions are going to be, what role will partners have in AI with their customers and what is available for them to sell, because a huge percentage of AI‑enabled chip sets, for example, are going to not many customers. A second feature of the market, but not really a concern, is around components, pricing and supply. We’ve gone into our financial planning for this year understanding something is going to happen there. We don’t really have any concerns around revenue, because any limit in supply is going to be far outweighed by a rise in the average selling price, but could it interrupt projects and roll-outs or cause people to delay a solution or choose a cloud-based solution instead of a physical hardware solution? It might influence some of those behaviours. Those are the two features I would highlight. If I look at what the market was trying to solve in 2025, AI apart, it was trying to solve the same problems as in 2024. Nor is the technology so different. It’s just better than it was a year ago. across a technology set. And where would you go to get those learnings? You can’t go to an individual vendor, because they’ll only tell you their bit. But with us there’s the opportunity to be taken through the whole technology stack. It’s quite heavy lifting, though, because at some point the partner is going to move from general awareness and general empowerment and accreditations to what they are actually going to do with their customers and how we can help them. And that isn’t about a platform, although a platform is very important, it’s about supporting partners in a bespoke way. TR: In your marketing material now you call yourself a technology aggregator and a distributor. Are they very different skills or services? DW: The challenge is what the word distribution means to individuals. We know what we mean by distribution, which is physical and virtual and all the services that we do to support the customers in those things. That isn’t always obvious to someone coming to us for the first time who might think of a distributor as more of a logistics provider. One of the reasons we’re working so hard on our branding is to drive our brand outside our reseller base, because there are many partners who are not resellers but still involved in putting deals together. They may buy nothing from us but still They’re different examples at different ends of the scale, but both come down to individuals in the company who have innovated and made a difference. TR: Picking up on your comments about empowering staff as close to the customer as possible, are events still a big part of your customer engagement activity? DW: Yes they are, and they’re really well attended. We run events, from vendor and customer CEO gatherings all the way through to individual vendor events and everything in between. The programmes we’re most proud of and that are most transformative for our customers are when we help them build a practice. One of the most significant of these is to help customers transform into the cloud. We work with them to identify their ability to support their customers into the cloud, we assess them, we work with them to develop the right capability, and then we help them sell. That’s a well baked practice we have for cloud. Security is another good example. We’ve now launched that practice builder concept for AI, with a program called Destination AI. We do a readiness assessment – How well are you able to deliver AI into your customers? What skills do you have or are you missing in the business? – and then we help take those partners to maturity. ‘Through that registered assessment, we’ve identified gaps in your business’. We help train them, we workshop with them and we help develop AI solutions they can offer to their customers. The first event we ran, at Heathrow in October, was neither of the things I’ve just described but more of a showcase of what partners can do and how we can support them, and it was over-subscribed almost as soon as we advertised it. The Direction of Technology report which we run each year shows our partners have a really high level of interest in delivering AI solutions, which you’d expect, but how they operationalise that interest to meet a customer need is far from certain. We’re filling that gap for our partners. And you’ll see that programme scale more and more. TR: Presumably that’s an instance of where the distribution model is very valuable, because your partners probably wouldn’t be able to get a complete view from one vendor. DW: The nomenclature around what distribution is and what it is not is more complex these days but the need of the end customer is absolutely all about creating a solution and that has to be aggregated
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