Threat Or Opportunity?
As the IT industry and the channel dealt with the second year of COVID-19 in 2021, channel executives continued working with channel partners to weather the seemingly never-ending pandemic and its resulting economic impact and supply chain disruptions.
But unlike 2020 when survival was the goal, many IT vendors and their channel partners stepped up in 2021 and took advantage of the new digital/virtual ways of doing business to provide IT products and services to their customers more efficiently. IT vendors and partners have also applied their new ways of operating to other go-to-market tasks such as customer recruitment and demand generation.
Some IT companies and their channel partners have even thrived in the turbulent environment as they meet growing demand for next-generation communications and collaboration and for IT and services to facilitate cloud migration and digital transformation.
We asked the honorees of the CRN 2022 Channel Chiefs list to tell us about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on their own channel strategies and operations in 2021, the impact on their solution provider partners, and the steps they took during the year to succeed. Here’s what some of them had to say.
