Partners are expanding and, in some cases, redefining their managed services offerings to deal with changing customer requirements, developments such as AI and increasingly complex multi-cloud landscapes.

Adaption is hardly new for channel companies. Necessity has been the mother of reinvention for the partner ecosystem as it’s evolved from product oriented to service centric over the past few decades. Cloud became the focal point for service provider evolution in the 2010s. But the cloud itself has changed. The technology has become much more industry specific, development oriented and — in the current economy — fiscally disciplined. The mainstreaming of AI only adds to the partner impetus for rapid adaptation.