Front Enlists Technology Service Distributors To Expand Market Reach For Its Customer Operations Platform: Exclusive

The new alliances bring the TSDs and the thousands of agents, technology consultants and VARs they work with into Front’s channel ecosystem.

Customer service platform developer Front is expanding its channel ecosystem, enlisting some of the industry’s leading technology services distributors (TSDs) in a move to bring its cloud-based offering to a wider audience of tech advisers, agents and consultants who influence IT buying decisions among midmarket and enterprise businesses.

Front Wednesday is unveiling new partnerships with Avant, Intelisys, Sandler Partners and Telarus, which in turn will make Front’s B2B customer service operations platform available to their extensive networks of technology advisers.

Through the Front-TSD agreements, the thousands of agents who work with the TSDs can now offer Front as part of their broader portfolios of customer experience, Unified-Communications-as-a-Service and Call-Center-as-a-Service cloud services and software

“These partnerships allow us to bring that advantage [of Front’s technology] to thousands of advisers whose clients are navigating high-stakes transformation initiatives,” said Mike Kane (pictured), Front senior vice president of global channel sales and partnerships, in an exclusive interview with CRN.

Front, founded in 2013 and based in San Francisco, develops its AI-powered customer operations platform that centralizes customer communications into a shared workspace for customer sales, service and support teams with the goal of improving customer service and more quickly resolving complex customer issues.

Front acquired Idiomatic, a developer of AI-powered “voice of the customer” technology, in November 2024.

Front has some 9,000 customers and in September 2025 announced that it had surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue. The company raised $65 million in Series D funding in 2022.

The customer service software industry is full of companies marketing applications for ticket resolution and other relatively simple customer interaction tasks. Front describes its offering as a multisystem, multiteam, multistep platform that combines collaboration, automation and AI capabilities to align customer interactions across multiple tools, including UCaaS, CCaaS and CRM systems. The company positions its offering as an “operational layer” that integrates with those often-disparate tools and provides “coordination and shared visibility” into often- complex customer-facing workflows.

Kane took on Front’s channel chief post in December, charged with scaling up the company’s channel sales. He previously worked at Dialpad for nearly nine years as senior vice president of global partner sales and, for a year and a half, also overseeing international sales. Before that Kane held channel management and sales posts at Ping Identity, Softchoice and Insight.

Front hired Kane in a bid to accelerate its growth in the channel with plans to continue investing in partner training, joint marketing programs and ecosystem expansion throughout 2026. Kane said he has spent the early months of 2026 assembling a channel team.

Technology Service Distributor Partnerships

The announcement of Front’s partnerships with Avant, Intelisys, Sandler Partners and Telarus is a significant step in those channel efforts. Kane said Front’s platform and its focus on the midmarket provide opportunities for the TSDs and their sales agent partners who serve as trusted technology advisers to their clients.

“This is a great spot to leverage the power of the TSDs and their advisers and a way to make it a win for all involved,” Kane said, noting that Front gets “very qualified opportunities” through the TSD channel. “Partners today are more impactful and more relevant in today’s environment than ever before.”

“We have long-established sales partners with impressive books of business,” said Ben Edwards, director of CX and AI at Sandler Partners, based in Redondo Beach, Calif., in the CRN interview. Those agents, he said, deeply understand their customers, their IT needs and use cases, and the expected outcomes of IT initiatives.

TSDs like Sandler Partners, he said, work alongside those agents throughout the sales process, guiding them to and qualifying the vendor products that best fit the end customers’ needs and then managing the sales transactions.

“Our sales partners look at our technical team here at Sandler Partners, and they like to take advantage of our resources,” Edwards said. “We’ve come from the real world. We’ve led real infrastructure teams. I led a contact center team. And so we’re personally and professionally very familiar with that high-volume, critical role in serving customers. And the sales partners feel comfortable when they bring on somebody like us.

“And I think that those [customer] organizations that take advantage of the sales partner motion, they have better outcomes as well, faster adoption, more successful projects,” Edwards added, pointing to the complexities around AI solutions as an example.

Telarus has been getting more requests for Front’s product from the distributor’s agents, said Meagan Thai, director of contact center and UC solutions at the Sandy, Utah-based distributor.

“Quite frankly, we were losing opportunities because [agents] could get Front elsewhere, and we didn’t have them in our portfolio,” she said in the interview with CRN. “We didn’t have anyone in our portfolio that can do what Front can do.”

Thai said the need for workflow automation in customer service operations is the big demand driver for Front. “The AI piece is huge these days, but more than anything, it’s workflow automation. They need AI for workflow automation … so they can be more efficient. And the partners were hearing that from their customers,” she said.

“Front expands our portfolio,” Edwards said of the new partnership. “We are opening up for those sales partners a new avenue of solutions and services for them to help enable their customers. This gives our partners the opportunity to put new, additional … and creative solutions in front of their customers.”