Leader EXPO 2025 arrived in Sydney earlier this week, bringing together 870 partners for the company’s annual IT distribution showcase to discuss the Windows 10 end-of-service opportunity, how AI is revolutionising distribution and more.
Ubiquiti kicked off the day with a presentation from Alex Bantjes, Leader’s national presales and training specialist for Ubiquiti, who spoke about the advancements in Ubiquiti’s product range, and how its position is evolving from SMB focused products to now providing a full enterprise solution.
“In addition to providing a range of new products and features, Ubiquiti’s enterprise program is not exclusive to only large customers, it helps partners with customers of all sizes to increase profitability and secure projects,” he said.
These new products include the likes of new high-performance gateways and switches, along with WiFi access points, enterprise network video recorders, surveillance cameras and more.
Bantjes said that Ubiquiti partners can now also utilise the company’s offerings of UI Care extended RA’s, CyberSecure enhanced security and Pro-Support for enhanced 24/7 support.
Nick Fraenkel, Leader's senior product manager for UC, took to the stage next to talk about 3CX's range of AI offerings, including the ability to uncover sentiment analysis, helping to understand the mood of customers at scale – a feature partners can also sell to customers.
He also said that AI-driven voice and chat agents are being built into 3CX’s offerings, with the company now supporting on-prem or private cloud AI deployment.
“You can basically sell each thing as a separate service, or you can bundle them all together if you like. The choice is yours, but it does open up a significant amount of revenue and profit opportunities that didn't exist in 3CX before,” Fraenkel said.
Ash Perkins, the commercial master trainer for Microsoft Australia, used his session with Leader’s infrastructure business manager, Symon Ten, to remind the audience that Windows 10 end of support is quickly approaching with a deadline of 14 October.
The duo warned that the implications for partners who don’t upgrade range from security vulnerabilities and Microsoft 365 being unsupported on Windows 10 to possible compliance and contractual violations.
They emphasised that the opportunity that the Windows 11 refresh presents, however, is in the SMB space – many devices in the market are ineligible for an upgrade to Windows 11 in both the enterprise and SMB markets, with the refresh of these aged devices offering a “huge opportunity” for resellers.
Microsoft Cloud’s partner solutions lead, Jahan Shikh, then revealed the findings of the company’s Journey to the Frontier Firm report, where the vendor surveyed 31,000 people across 31 countries.
He shared the company’s vision around how it sees organisations’ AI transformations taking place, with the goal to progress through phase 1, where every employee has an AI assistant and phase 2, where agents join teams as ‘digital colleagues’, taking on specific tasks given by human direction, onto phase 3, where humans give direction and agents run entire business processes and workflows autonomously.
His presentation also uncovered what he termed as the ‘capacity gap’. Microsoft research showed close to four-fifths (79%) of the Australian workforce agreed they don’t have enough time/energy to do work and nearly half (47%) of Australian leaders surveyed agreed productivity must increase – with business demands outpacing human capacity - but 75% of Australian leaders are confident they’ll use digital labour to expand that workforce capacity.
“We're at this interesting point where on one hand, the managers, the leaders, are looking to get more out of their teams. They're expecting more, but at the same time, the workforce is saying we're stretched out, we're at full capacity, almost to a point of burnout, so these leaders are actually now looking at AI as that workforce extension,” Shikh told the audience.
“It's not about replacing one with the other. It's really about understanding what the opportunity is to use these AI and agents to be able to extend that capacity of your workforce.”
Lenovo Notebook & Server’s presentation focused on the complete portfolio of the company’s AI infrastructure and devices ranging from mobile devices and PCs to edge and data centre solutions.
The company also spoke about its Lenovo 360 MSP Boost program – applicable to all of its devices and storage portfolio – which is a rewards-based company-level program unique to MSPs and able for partners to access exclusively through Leader.
ViewSonic Commercial were the final vendor to take the stage, closing out the day by showcasing their “comprehensive visual solutions”, comprising of pen displays, monitors, presentation displays, interactive displays, projectors and am all-in-one direct view LED display.
With ViewSonic now counting over 10 million users of its software worldwide, country manager Jack Hung also spoke about the future of the ViewSonic range, including new projectors, presentation signage, collaboration solutions and LED displays, including a foldable, preassembled, plug and play 138” screen.
Following the presentations, guests got to engage with 40 different vendors, resellers and industry experts showcasing their solutions.
Leader's EXPO 2025 held events in Adelaide in May and Brisbane in July, with a Melbourne event taking place yesterday after Sydney's session earlier in the week. Leader will head to Perth on 23 September to close out EXPO 2025.
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