News in the Channel - issue #36

PREDICTIONS

Jen Wilson , co-founder and operations director, Illuminate Learning For 2026, unified communications will be less about the platforms

increasingly expect their communications tools to connect naturally with CRM systems, service platforms and core business applications. For partners, this shifts the conversation away from

themselves and far more about the value customers actually get from them. Most organisations already have more tools than they know what to do with. What they are looking for now is clarity. AI will play a big role, but not in the way the marketing suggests. Basic features such as transcription and meeting notes are already expected. The real differentiator will be how well partners help customers apply intelligence to everyday work – simplifying processes, reducing friction and making better decisions. All while keeping control, security and governance firmly in place. UCaaS will continue to underpin collaboration strategies, but on its own it is no longer enough. Customers

licences and towards integration, optimisation and ongoing service.

Hybrid work is also settling into a more realistic phase. The focus is moving from where people work to how work actually happens: fewer unnecessary meetings, better collaboration across locations, and experiences that work for everyone, not just those in the room. Ultimately, customers will judge success on meaningful outcomes, Partners who can evidence real improvements in productivity and customer experience will be the ones that stand out in 2026. n

Jen Wilson

lluminate-learning.co.uk

Jay Snyder , SVP of partners and alliances, Dynatrace In 2026, AI will stop operating as an isolated discipline and will become a normal component of cloud-native

sure that AI operates reliably in production. For example, ensuring that AI runs within the same workflows, guardrails and delivery pipelines used for the rest of the cloud-native system. For channel partners, this means a growing need to implement and manage holistic observability stacks that span AI, application, and cloud layers, removing the distinction between ‘AI observability’ and traditional telemetry so customers benefit from a unified operating model. This is the most exciting piece for our partners who sit at the bleeding intersection between industry and technology. With AI, they deliver more robust business-driven insights and outcomes than ever before. n

software delivery. Teams will integrate AI into digital services the same way they integrate databases or other core systems.

As a result, AI engineering, cloud engineering, SRE, and security will

converge into a shared operating model with common pipelines, shared SLOs and unified accountability for the full lifecycle of AI-enabled services. This shift has major implications for channel partners, which serve as the intermediary between this

Jay Snyder

dynatrace.com

technology and their customers. To reflect this evolution in how

modern software behaves, end-to-end observability will be essential to making