Tech Data invested in enabling capable, ‘intelligent’ partner ecosystem across APAC

“There’s very heavy lifting for partners. Distribution will have to shift from a mere commercial support agency to someone who really handholds the partners to scale and live up to the outcomes required by customers.”

The AI era is rife with opportunities as many technologies come together and advance at a rapid pace, but the increasing complexities are pressuring channel partners to improve their capabilities equally fast. Anand Chakravarthy, Vice President, Advanced Solutions at Tech Data Asia Pacific and Japan shared that the distributors remain committed to uplift partners as well as support vendors through these tricky times.

“Partners have to cope with learning, implementation capabilities, having resources to offer solutions, and really support customers’ business outcomes,” Chakravarthy told CRN Asia. “There’s very heavy lifting for partners.

“Distribution will have to shift from a mere commercial support agency to someone who really handholds the partners to scale and live up to the outcomes required by customers.”

He believes it is the norm for partners to scale up quickly with every innovation in technology, though he acknowledged that today’s advancements are pulling partners in all directions as vendors’ expectations and customer ambitions rise accordingly.

“Many partners do really show that initial sign of embracing it quickly,” he said. “You have to quickly identify them and then support them to scale up.

“It’s no different for other markets too but you may have different learning curves in each market depending on how the ecosystem is developing in each geography. We adapt accordingly to play along with vendors to bring the partners up to speed.”

Similar customer needs, varying partner capabilities across APAC

When asked to compare the multiple country markets across the Asia Pacific region, Chakravarthy said that while they may have different business needs, depending on their vertical and organization size, customers are “by and large similar”.

In terms of opportunities, India presents massive potential from a technology advancement perspective just for its sheer size, with Australia, Singapore, and Japan offering “great uplift”. The rest of ASEAN are quickly catching up.

Regardless, Tech Data’s target markets are largely reliant on vendors’ regional strategies, as well as how “aspirational” and ambitious local partners are. Chakravarthy shared that he has seen stand out differences amongst partners across the region.

“The capabilities of partners of different shapes and sizes and countries vary from country to country,” he said. “That's where the need for someone like us to build global GTMs and execute locally to support partners to live up to the needs of the customers.

“[Say] If you’re looking at a particular technology, all you have to do is assess what capabilities the partners have. If there is an aspiration to really deliver a certain kind of technology where they don’t have the capability, we play the role of supporting them.”

This could mean enabling partners to scale up, providing support in terms of the demos, POCs, COEs, and even offering pre-sales and post-sales support in some cases.

‘We play every area that matters’

Besides partner enablement and support, Tech Data is also committed to helping partners improve their margins.

“Everybody wants participation in the revenue that the market offers,” he said. “Partners have become very clear that they can't grow their revenue alone by capturing market share, and along with that, retain a good amount of margin too to really make sure what they want to participate in is meaningful.”

Tech Data has developed a partner-first platform that automates renewal processes across cloud solutions, as well as help partners manage renewal opportunities around services, licenses, and software. Partners can also access multiple resources to help increase their “pie of the services” in areas where they lack the expertise or investment in.

Their commitment to raising the bar for partners is boundless as they aim to build and support a “sizeable, intelligent” partner ecosystem that helps established as well as new vendors achieve their objectives in the market, particularly in the areas of AI, cybersecurity, and cloud services.

“We therefore invest our time and resources on the three key focus areas,” said Chakravarthy. “It can be on geography expansion, it can be in terms of technical enablement for the partners to scale up, or in terms of giving them access to a particular technology.

“We play every area that matters for vendors. At the same time those that are required by the partners to take a good share of the growing market for such key vendors.”