AI may lead to a systems integrator renaissance, says Steve Martin

Channel stalwart Steve Martin said the systems integrator industry may be due an uptick thanks to the popularity of artificial intelligence.

At the end of July, Martin left NEXTDC after 11 years in various leadership roles, most recently as the company's head of sales for major markets in Australia. 

Martin also held senior roles at Novell, Symantec, Channel Dynamics and Adobe before joining NextDC, but said he isn’t done with the IT industry yet.

While he’s engaged in a range of conversations about where he might focus his efforts next, Martin said the key was finding the “right job, not just the next job” and he was happy to spend the next few months waiting for that opportunity to crop up.

In a LinkedIn post announcing his departure from NEXTDC, Martin speculated that his next role would likely be in the artificial intelligence space, an area he sees as holding a huge amount of potential.

“A lot of AI is not quite hitting the mark," he said.

"It's application-specific AI, rather than whole-of-enterprise AI and I think there's a real gap in being able to talk to an enterprise about 100 things or 1,000 things that they could do with a proper AI system at the centre of their business now.

“I think I can play a role somewhere in that space, but I also don't think that the company that I want to work for exists yet today, that's part of the challenge."

Martin reflected on the IT channel more broadly, noting the massive consolidation that has happened over his four-plus decades in the industry.

“If you were to go back in time, say, a decade ago, I could pretty easily name 100 systems integrators in Australia, but the systems integration community has diminished somewhat over the last decade,” he told techpartner.news.

But he added that from his view, that trend may be about to end amid an incoming wave of cloud repatriation, which is not, he made clear, a complete reversal away from cloud.

“What repatriation means is, businesses are starting to get more focused on managing costs on an application by application or service by service basis, and they're starting to be more specific around 'does this application make sense to be in the cloud, or is it more cost effective for me to run it on my own hardware?'” he explained.

The other trend that he sees driving the systems integrator resurgence is, of course, AI.

“To do AI properly for an enterprise across hundreds of different applications within that enterprise, you really need to build your own in-house AI system because it truly does become the brain of your business," he said.

"It touches all of your intellectual property, it touches all of your systems if you do it well.

“I think that the integration requirements around AI and around connecting your dedicated AI system to all of your data, applications and services and customer interaction points will require some deep integration skills layered with new skills around AI and building learning models that are specific to a particular organisation.”

Reflecting on his time at NEXTDC, he said the highlights were helping to build the channel-focused culture at NEXTDC and the value he had helped build within the partner community.

“It's been a great privilege to have helped build NEXTDC into the largest data centre company in Australia, I greatly enjoyed my time there. I’m really looking forward to the next opportunity, and while I don't quite know what that's going to look like yet, I've got a reasonable idea.

"Watch this space."