Distributors as ecosystem orchestrators in Southeast Asia

Vendors are relying more on distributors to not just reach out to new markets but also in how they recruit more partners to drive their growth.

According to Ananth Lazarus, Managing Director for GTDC APJ, the ASEAN region is one of the most structurally attractive growth markets heading into 2026 across APJ.

“ASEAN continues to benefit from strong macro tailwinds: sustained GDP growth above developed markets, rapid digitalization of SMEs, government-led cloud, cybersecurity and AI adoption, and increasing regional relevance as a manufacturing and supply-chain diversification hub. Markets such as Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam are seeing accelerating demand for cloud infrastructure, data, security, analytics and AI-driven solutions,” said Lazarus.

He believes this creates significant opportunity for distributors and partners that can provide platform leverage, and a continued pivot toward outcome-based and services-led models.

“The opportunity is substantial, but it favors distributors that can operate as ecosystem orchestrators rather than pure logistics engines,” added Lazarus.

With that said, distributors are proving to play an increasingly important role for vendors in the region. Over the past year, several vendors have made significant changes or revamped their partner programs to enable better opportunities for their partners.

Vendors are also working with their distributors to get the best out their partners, especially in the ASEAN region. This includes relying on distributors to help them identify the right type of partners to go to market with.

Vendors and distributors in Asia

For Harsh Vaishnav, Senior Director and Head of Channels for ASEAN, Hong Kong, India, and SAARC at Nutanix, distributors are critical for them, especially in bridging the communication between the partner and the OEM. This includes facilitating payment schedules, cycles, and such.

“In Southeast Asia, distributors are very well involved with how the business happens. To give you an example, in countries like Indonesia and the Philippines, for example, the distributors help us not just identify partners, but they also have got dedicated teams to run the Nutanix business. This team goes to the partners, helps them with the one-on-ones, two-on-ones if required around both sales and pre-sales perspective,” he explained.

Along with that, Vaishnav pointed out that distributors identify and bring accounts and work closely with the partner to go and meet the customer, do the heavy lifting on the customer side also at times, and helps Nutanix close deals.

“So, we don't see the distributors in most of these regions to be just helping us solve point-in-time issues, but they also genuinely contribute to our business. And hence, we've also gone ahead and invested pretty significantly in this fiscal year with distributors by giving them resources through programs and making sure that they are very well aligned to the sales and not just help us address one or two aspects of the business only,” he added.

Meanwhile, Kartika Prihadi, VP, Partner and Routes to Market Sales, Cisco APJC explained that the new Cisco 360 partner program provides a path whereby new specialized partners can come in and just focus on a specific product. To identify these partners, the vendor is working with its distribution partners to educate the uncovered and non-managed partners about the program as well as identify those that want to come in and grow with the vendor.

“We're using that avenue to bring in new partners. These partners work with our distributors, but they may not be a Cisco partner. However, they may be good in a specific area. So, we need to leverage distributors to be more intentional in identifying those partners that we want to bring in, especially in the newer areas,” Prihadi said.