News in the Channel - issue #24

REVIEW

Mike Barron , managing director, SYNAXON UK We’ve taken another big step forward in 2024 achieving high double-digit growth for the second year running. We expect to carry on in the same vein in 2025 and to accelerate our growth even more. We’ve got even closer to our partners in the past year, and I can only see our relationships becoming even stronger.

customers – for service and support, and for new devices, software upgrades and protection from cyberattacks. As more technologies become integral to partner businesses knowing that they have a channel partner like SYNAXON that they can depend upon is more important than ever – especially to SMB resellers who are still developing in areas such as cloud, cybersecurity and managed services and I think even more partners will have a need for that kind of relationship in 2025. There is every reason to be positive about the year ahead. I’d expect to see a strong hardware sector, driven by delayed COVID refreshes, AI PCs, and Windows 11 upgrades. We are preparing to support our partners in taking full advantage of that opportunity.

Partners really value the personal service, account management, and the process automation and efficiency that we provide and which sets SYNAXON apart from other suppliers. They know that they can depend on us and that we will always be there for them. I think that’s been driven by a growing need among partners for closer interaction and engagement. It’s a challenge for them to keep on top of technological developments while also meeting the everyday needs of

Mike Barron

synaxon-services.com

John McKindland , head of partner channel UK, Sona Business We have seen some channel vender M&A this year especially in the Alt Net arena and although inevitable, it has happened faster than expected. Long-term it will be for the channel to bring networks closer together, driving further investment and bringing an already diverse product range to a wider audience. Network projects upgrading from GPON to XGS-PON over the last year have gathered

pace and have expanded the reach of symmetric speeds of up to 10Gbps This has had a major impact delivering a high bandwidth lower cost proposition across the regions to a wider audience. Building a high-capacity high speed network for Digital Britain is going to be critical for economic growth in 2025 and beyond. Vendor and reseller consolidation will continue in 2025, and we will see the addressable market shrink slightly, however we will also see continued vendor product development and competition, which can only be good for the channel. The contact centre market has rallied in 2024 with greater choice available from vendors. With better connectivity and reliability now available to a wider audience we will see a continuation in the deployment of cloud contact centres with omnichannel capabilities with channel partners looking for vendors such as Sona to provide a single proposition of a secure hosted contact centre with high-speed reliable connectivity.

In terms of key trends this year, the PSTN countdown clock continues to tick across the UK. In addition, there has been a lot of consolidation in the channel over the last year and the number of top tier communication providers has shrunk. But we have also seen the next batch of resellers striving for growth, brand building and looking for more white label solutions to bolt into their portfolios. Our biggest challenge this year has been building a proposition that differentiates from the market standard and ensuring we can deliver value and profitable white label solutions for our partners. We have focused on our network capabilities only onboarding Layer 2 products and services and targeting specific vendors in the Alt Net community to deliver our services.

John McKindland

sonabusiness.com

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