Disruption Now

The channel has been warned for a couple of years about the impending disruption to come from customers' adoption of disruptive technologies like the cloud and IoT, and that to avoid being disrupted it is necessary to disrupt yourself.

Whew!

Well, that time has actually arrived. a string of new ways of doing business--moving to the cloud, moving from the cloud, consumption-based pricing, everything-as-a-service, continuing shifts in security threats, IoT, and more--are all to some extent or another impacting nearly every market, with businesses either on the way to adopting to the new paradigms, scrambling to adopt, or floundering and left wondering how long their old ways of doing business will be viable.

Channel-focused companies who do not embrace disruption in 2020 will find survival in 2021 difficult. That leaves many in the channel looking at what it will take to reinvent themselves to meet changing customer requirements. For some, this will mean a whole-hearted adoption of the cloud and related technologies. For others, it will mean partnering closely with other companies who can handle the disruption for them while they change. Others will face the prospect of a merger or acquisition to gain the scale to make the changes. And some will, well, let's not go down that depressing path for now.