Partners weigh growth pressures at Crayon Connect 2026

Up to 150 partners gathered yesterday in Sydney at Crayon Connect 2026 to hear more about what the integration between SoftwareOne and Crayon means for their businesses. 

The acquisition of Crayon by the Norwegian-based cloud solutions provider, announced in July of last year, created one of Microsoft's largest partners globally. 

In Sydney yesterday, partners heard that the combined organisation has “greater capability than any other partner in market, particularly on the services side", according to Mathew Howard, general manager of Channel ANZ Sales at Crayon, a SoftwareOne Company.

“We are looking at how we can scale that through channel, so there will be new offerings that we will be able to deliver through channel over the coming 12 months that we haven't been able to deliver before.“ 

Howard noted that 70 percent of SoftwareOne’s activities, particularly in Australia, are professional services and managed services, traditionally focused on the enterprise market. 

“I want to be very clear, the SoftwareOne business is not here to at all compete with our channel business, it's there to complement," he stated.

“We remain channel-first, partner-first in everything that we do, and the professional services business of SoftwareOne is there to complement.” 

The combined business comprises SoftwareOne; Crayon, handling channel distribution and partner enablement; Parallo, providing managed services for software companies; and emt Distribution, offering cybersecurity solutions in Australia, New Zealand & APAC. 

It has five practices covering modern workplace and AI; cybersecurity; cloud services; data and AI; and business applications. 

Partner strategy

Yesterday was also a chance to hear how some partners are tapping Crayon and SoftwareOne to take their services further.

We heard one partner talk about the potential upside they saw from taking advantage of SoftwareOne’s experience helping clients harness data.

“They’ve got agents, they've got projects, they've got Fabric that's already rolled out and they've got that expertise. It's those use cases and really knowing strategically what's worked and what hasn't, and how that can be taken to the SMC market,” they said.

“In theory, they should be able to bring huge weight to that whole side of my business.”

Attendees heard how BlueAPACHE, despite having a significant team, had seen a use for Crayon services to help it deal with significant concurrent client engagements, including with a major multinational client with a large, complex cloud estate.

They also heard how Sydney managed services consultancy Real World Technology Solutions had used Crayon and SoftwareOne to extend testing services for enterprise customers.

techpartner.news is the media partner of Crayon Connect 202 Sydney.