The ANS team ventured down to Birmingham for Channel Live 2024. Channel Live is the UK’s largest ICT channel event for resellers, MSPs etc to connect with vendors and distributors. The 2-day programme has been designed to trigger insightful conversations, educate the community, and provide practical business advice for the channel. This year also saw additions such as tech tours, guiding visitors around exhibitor stands with various themes, and roundtable discussions throughout the day.

If you didn’t make the event, don’t worry, our experts put together our key highlights below…

The era of AI in the channel

With generative AI, you don’t have to spend time creating things from scratch. It offers a new way of working that boosts your productivity and efficiency. Recently rolled out Copilot, a tool billed as an “everyday AI companion”, has fast become a popular topic in every industry. Copilot works across Office apps, summarising meeting minutes in seconds, drafting reports and emails just as quickly, generating original images, slides, and text for tasks that might normally take half a day to hash out — all with a sentence or two of prompting.

With how popular it’s growing, this means there could be a rush of Microsoft 365 migrations to take advantage of the AI assistant. It also means IT teams and MSPs will have their work cut out for them. As AI continues to shape industries, there’s a huge need for a hands-on experience, a shift in mindset, and learning. The future lies in building a culture that embraces the dynamic nature of AI, fostering innovation and growth.

 

Tackling the skills gap

Channel partners are keen to expand into cloud, security, and digital services but face challenges due to skills gaps and vendor collaboration complexities.

Developing skills and forging efficient partnerships are crucial for overcoming these obstacles highlighted during seminars at Channel Live. They expressed frustration over offering services beyond their capabilities and recognised the importance of addressing this in their 2024 strategy.

 

Resellers need more than just good connectivity

Partners must diversify into cloud, security, and digital services to stay competitive and avoid falling behind. The market is dynamic with Full Fire coverage, low margins, and a shift towards over-the-top services. Whilst connectivity remains fundamental to delivering additional services, the focus has now firmly moved to over-the-top services across digital transformation.

 

 

We had a great two-days at Channel Live, with lots of fantastic conversations with current and new partners looking to evolve and diversify with digital transformation services. We’d like to thank the brilliant organisers at the event, and we already can’t wait for next year!

At ANS, our Partner Programme has been designed with the channel at the heart of it. If you’d like to know more, or to find out how we can help your business efficiencies and grow, please feel free to get in touch with the team.