Crayon Connect Sydney: Partners urged to sharpen cyber "swords" for AI

Technology partners should be readying “sharper cybersecurity swords and business continuity shields” to underpin customers' success with AI, they heard at Crayon Connect in Sydney yesterday.

The event, which brought together MSPs, cybersecurity advisors, ISVs and other technology firms, with Crayon and technology vendors, showed how the IT channel is working to find its place in the AI adoption story.

Businesses are installing third party AI agents with disregard for compliance, said Crayon Senior Vice President, Channel & Strategy, APAC, Warren Nolan, quoting a major software vendor.

Rather than focus purely on AI solutions, technology partners should be preparing customers by addressing data management, organisational, privacy and security matters, they heard.

That was a common industry mantra last year and “I'd argue that it is still the case,” Nolan said.

Consulting comes to the fore

The increasingly sophisticated nature of engagements with technology customers was another common thread at yesterday's Crayon Connect event.

As one partner told us: “ I've been in IT now for 35 years and it goes in cycles…We're currently on the cycle of consulting again, with 365, security, AI – it's very much a consulting environment now.”

“We've got to have that ability to provide consulting services. That's a difficult thing to do, and to be blunt, managing consultants is one of the hardest things to do as opposed to managing engineers and technicians.”

We spoke to a handful of partners who were tapping Crayon’s network to find like-minded businesses to help them with this, and to maintain relevance in other ways.

That included a communications provider looking for MSPs and IT services firms, and a Microsoft Business Applications firm working with Crayon partners to service customers.

Crayon's pitch to partners

Distributors continue to jostle to help partners with these challenges. Crayon is pushing the slogan “Distribution, done differently”, pointing to the expertise it has gained working globally with end-user organisations, and its Technology Advisory Group and ISV Innovation Hub, among other offerings.

“We provide subject matter experts, technical advice, go-to-market strategy, licencing expertise, all those things,” Nolan said. “We have had to – as a result of the expectations of our customers – transform.”

 Crayon has invested heavily in subject matter experts, noted its APAC Executive Vice President Rhonda Robati, “so you don’t have to spend the money to hire that expertise.”

Robati also stressed the need for partners to optimise their businesses. For example, readying data and being able to provide the right licence to the right user at the right time "sounds really simple. But it really is critical for your ability to be able to innovate and grow,” she said.

Like others, Crayon is pushing a platform as part of the solution to these challenges. Yesterday in Sydney, partners heard about Crayon’s new Cloud-IQ Next Gen platform for procurement, analytics and data insights, among other capabilities. This tool has been deployed with partners in Southeast Asia. 

M&A and change

Unsurprisingly, Crayon’s merger with SoftwareOne was not on the official agenda at this week’s Sydney event.

Instead, the focus was on how partners can evolve their businesses to meet customers' cybersecurity, data and AI needs.

“If there's one thing that's consistent with your business and our business,” Nolan said, “it’s that we need to be open minded and prepared to evolve.”