What do you see as the toughest challenges facing customers in 2023?

Joyce Mullen, President, CEO, Insight Enterprises

Continued economic uncertainty in 2023 is forcing organizations to be as cost-conscious as ever, and our challenge is to help our clients make high-value decisions amid the uncertainty. But this is also an incredible opportunity for everyone to get wiser about how they use their resources, where modern technology like automation can open the door to greater agility and new insights about the business. ... Being a trusted partner means that we can meet clients where they are to help them get to where they want to be—from IT strategy and design to implementation, organizational change and day-to-day management.

Gee Rittenhouse, CEO, Skyhigh Security

The toughest challenge we see is securing a modern enterprise in an environment where data and users are everywhere. Many clients struggle just being able to identify where their data is, who has access to it, who is supposed to have access to it and when they should have access to it. These are tough challenges for our clients. This is particularly true in an environment where they are short-staffed and access to talent is still a struggle. In addition, CISOs now find themselves with increased board oversight. As a result, they are looking to work with trusted partners and a reduced ecosystem to simplify wherever they can.

Dan Schwab, Co-President, D&H Distributing

Customer experience will require additional channel transformation and will pose challenges, especially for VARs and MSPs that serve the SMB and midmarket sectors. CX and life-cycle management is critical for customer retention, driving consumption and renewals as the market moves to as-a-service models. Many vendors are requiring certifications and investments in this area. D&H is investing in Customer Success Specialists to help partners execute CX responsibilities and evolving automated resources such as the D&H Cloud Marketplace and Cisco Partner Enablement platforms with business intelligence data to make the process easier.

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Gajen Kandiah, CEO, Hitachi Vantara

Technology leaders are challenged with how to manage data across an ever-changing infrastructure landscape and, for many, the enterprise data center is in a bit of a crisis. An explosion of unstructured data, a ‘reconciliation’ from cloud to on-premises, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud and so on has placed cost, complexity and flexibility squarely at the top of customers’ concerns. ... By fostering an ecosystem of collaboration and leveraging the full weight of Hitachi’s industrial expertise, we’re enabling our partners to provide trusted solutions and unmatched reliability to any customer, regardless of size or industry.

Pat Gelsinger,

Globally, we continue to see macroeconomic headwinds and economic uncertainty. ... Semiconductor manufacturing that is too concentrated in any one region can cause rapid and extraordinary disruption like we saw during the pandemic. ... Even as we all continue to face these global challenges, semiconductors remain as critical as ever to power essential technologies. With everything going more digital, we believe the long-term demand for semiconductors will continue to grow. This is why Intel continues to focus on navigating the challenges of today while still investing for the needs of tomorrow.

What is the key to success for your channel partners in 2023?

Chuck Robbins, Chair, CEO, Cisco Systems

The complexity produced by our industry continues to grow without bound, and our partners are struggling to keep up with that craziness. As such, I believe the key for success of our channel partners is to continue working closely with us as we simplify the cloud edge and data protection. We’ll continue to simplify the buying motion, the training engagement and other operational tasks. Partners can become successful by just caring about solving our customers’ biggest problems and not worrying about complicated processes and tools. processes

Yang Yuanqing, Chair, CEO, Lenovo

The key success factor is to grow, learn and transform together in a changing world. Today, many small and medium businesses and large enterprises are moving toward the Everything-as-a-Service consumption model, and Lenovo has built our solutions and services business into a new growth engine. We will work with our channel partners and seize these opportunities together. In the past few years, the industry has faced many uncertainties such as manufacturing disruptions, supply risks and the global pandemic, and some of them are likely to persist for a while. So we will continue to help our channel partners and navigate through these challenges together. navigate

Raghu Raghuram, CEO, VMware

Customer success in multi-cloud depends on a connected ecosystem. Neither VMware nor any single partner can solve all of a customer’s needs alone. Through our interconnected and diverse global partner ecosystem, we enable more partner-to-partner collaboration to help customers to become ‘cloud smart’ and achieve outcomes faster. ... Partners focusing on business outcomes, such as accelerating app modernization, enabling enterprise cloud transformation and securing the hybrid workforce, will be best positioned for success.

Jayshree Ullal, President, CEO, Arista Networks

Arista has been rapidly expanding into the campus as a natural adjacent selling opportunity. With businesses changing rapidly, as evidenced by new hybrid work environments and distributed enterprises to support them, channel partners have a complete Arista solutions portfolio to address these evolving needs. This shift, along with the transition to data-driven cloud networking, is driving the need for technology refreshes that can support these changing needs. Channel partners can now leverage innovations from Arista to introduce anti-legacy technologies that truly address 21st century data-driven networking requirements.

Eugene Kaspersky, CEO, Kaspersky

We can see that more and more MSPs are looking to diversify their offerings and to generate more revenue streams from each individual customer without necessarily having to invest more in people or expertise. This means that MSPs will rely even more on vendor services. Also, the inability of many MSPs to build their own SOC provides great opportunities to sell or upsell Kaspersky’s managed security services into their existing install base. We also continue to accommodate more advanced security needs to larger MSPs and MSSPs by making more products available through our subscription price list.