Eaton Unveils Marketing Moves Designed To Empower Channel Partners

As AI pushes infrastructure requirements to new levels, Eaton is rethinking how it supports channel partners. Steven Loeb, vice president of marketing for Distributed IT at Eaton, joined CRNtv host Sydney Neely to outline how leadership changes and targeted investments are shaping Eaton’s go-to-market strategy heading into 2026.

Sydney: You’ve spent years leading Eaton’s sales strategy, and now you’re taking the reins in marketing. What made this the right time for the transition, and how is your perspective from sales shaping the way you approach this new chapter?

Steven: Aside from my own personal development as a leader and professional growth within one of the best companies in the world to work for, there were really only two things that drove me to move into this role.

We had a leadership transition this year, with a more than 20-year veteran of our industry within this division retiring in May. Linsey Miller then came on board, and I know you had a chance to meet her earlier this year and interview her at one of our events.

She came in with a wealth of experience in newer markets and newer technologies, areas that we had not really been focused on here at Eaton. We wanted to make sure that transition was smooth and that the voice of our partners and end customers rang louder than ever as we worked through it.

My experience in this space spans nearly 20 years, not to date myself too much. I have really enjoyed assisting with that transition, and I am excited about how this will be experienced by our partner and end-user communities for years to come.

We have always been observed as a thought leader in the single-phase UPS space, and we have had many successes with our other offerings across rack power, rack enclosure and connectivity peripherals. The market is evolving, and our customers’ and partners’ needs have grown dramatically over the past 12 to 18 months. A new lens was necessary to keep up with that speed of evolution.

Rather than continuing to tell the story as an echo of the collaborative relationships our sales teams have cultivated over many years, as well as new partners hoping to join our program, including MSPs and IT partners, I felt my time would be best served working closely with the development and marketing teams responsible for turning that story into reality.

I am excited about the opportunity to solidify Eaton’s strategy around our extensive offerings, expert partner community and a rapidly transforming marketplace, with innovation, growth and execution at our core.

Sydney: There’s so much happening across the channel right now, from AI to infrastructure. What trends are standing out to you, and how is Eaton helping partners make the most of them?

Steven: As you have probably heard extensively at many events and across the industry, generative AI and agentic AI are moving from an experimental phase into full-scale enterprise deployment.

AI is becoming embedded in workflows, customer experience and analytics. From data centers to the edge, compute, storage and networking assets are growing in density and design requirements.

Eaton continues to be the physical infrastructure expert our partners rely on to design appropriate power, rack and cooling solutions, which are critical to enabling uptime and continuity for these resources.

Our focus is on enabling partner strategies to identify and deliver the critical infrastructure components needed to support increasing power densities and the critical uptime requirements of these applications.

Sydney: Partnership has always been central to Eaton’s success. What new resources or capabilities has your team rolled out to make it easier for partners to grow their business and connect with customers?

Steven: For us, over the past 12 months, it has really been about having the right people in the right places to develop and engineer the products the market is asking for and that our partners rely on to generate growth opportunities.

We have invested in product and engineering resources across Eaton to drive faster development cycles and meet the needs of a rapidly evolving market. Within this business alone, we have added more than 30 people, along with additional investments in adjacent functions.

In addition to these organic efforts, we have taken and will continue to take strategic inorganic actions to fill gaps outside what would typically be considered Eaton’s core competencies, but which are critical to our customers’ and partners’ needs.

The need for fully integrated rack, power and cooling solutions, as well as modular offerings to support accelerated AI workloads from data centers through edge deployments, has been a major focus for Eaton over the past year.

Sydney: This year, we’ve heard from Adam about innovation, Christian about enablement and Linsey about growth. How do you see all of these conversations coming together, and what’s the message you want partners to remember as we head into 2026?

Steven: Eaton’s core tenets of leading for growth, investing for growth and executing for growth are the major drivers behind everything you have heard from Adam, Christian and Linsey.

We have never been more engaged with our partners and customers, as our ideation and innovation are increasingly driven by deep collaboration and customer intimacy in the market. We take those inputs and combine them with our expertise in physical infrastructure technologies to drive new offerings into the white space for AI workloads.

To do that, we have invested in our business by adding expertise in areas critical to these solutions where Eaton has not historically been viewed as an expert, both through talent investments and acquisitions.

I am very excited for our partner community as we continue to evolve to be faster and more agile in our product innovation and development cycles. We believe this will enable our partners to lead and grow in a rapidly evolving technology landscape.

For more on Eaton’s partner programs and solutions, visit PowerAdvantage.Eaton.com/CRN.