REVIEW OF 2023
CONTINUED
Rachel Rothwell , senior regional director, UK and Ireland, Zyxel Networks The past year was, overall, just about
For partners, Q1 of 2024 is an ideal time to start talking to customers about their plans and sowing the seeds of growth. There is a lot to talk about – WiFi 7, new cybersecurity products now coming to market, switching to managed services, and ensuring the network has the throughput needed to support hybrid working. We can also see good opportunities emerging in some vertical sectors, where there is a need for businesses to provide faster, more reliable wireless connectivity to guests. More investment is needed in hotels and guest houses, and in the growing number of coffee houses, restaurants and bars, and smaller independent retailers that are now starting to take over the high street. There is also good potential in education, where further investment in infrastructure and security is certainly needed, but budgets are tighter than ever.
what we expected. There were some real challenges, but we did see some positives. Interest in managed services continued to rise and we’ve seen more partners adopting our Nebula platform and taking the opportunity to get themselves established as MSPs. We will be looking to build further on that and help those partner grow in 2024. Sales of WiFi and security gateways have been better than we expected they might be at the start of the year, and small multi-gig switches have also been popular – especially among SMBs. We expect to see a distinct improvement in market conditions in 2024, but I think we may need to be patient as it could take time for confidence to return. Once it does, we expect to see much of the investment that is needed and has been held back in the past year, released.
Rachel Rothwell
zyxel.com
Miguel Rodriguez , managing director, SYNAXON Hub Of course, 2023 was a difficult year in some
on-premise – you need a way to access and use apps and services. While hardware sales in the channel overall were down last year, we saw significant growth in our SYNAXON Hub business. We expect to see that grow even more in 2024 as businesses release the purse strings and upgrade to the latest technologies. Being able to source the right products at the right time and at competitive prices will be important. We’ve seen significant organic growth in usage of our EGIS stock checking and order management system in this past year. The data is personalised to its users, so they see their own live pricing that’s available from each distributor. That makes a real difference. I think partners are now looking harder at how they can automate processes and take costs out of their business, while continuing to get the best pricing and availability across all distributors, and I think we will see them move further in this direction in 2024.
ways, but, by and large, resellers have simply got on with the job of meeting the needs of their customers. We are quietly confident that 2024 will be considerably better. The channel and IT generally has been in a period of transition over these last two years – moving further towards an as- a-service approach, migrating workloads to the cloud, and embracing managed services. That’s going to continue and, in my view, accelerate in 2024. The growing dependency on technology means that end customers and partners now need to work together much more closely – and partners in turn, need their suppliers to support them in the right way. We'll be looking to do that with our pre-defined managed services and DaaS offerings and we see good potential for growth in this area. “At the same time, we should not forget that to make use of any IT system – cloud or
Miguel Rodriguez
synaxon-services.com
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