CRN Pipeline 2023 kicked off yesterday afternoon on the Queensland Gold Coast with more than150 technology partners hearing from major IT buyers and key channel players about array of pressing business and IT issues.
Held by the beach at the Sheraton Grand Mirage Gold Coast, the event also brought together 17 sponsors and special guests from leading corporate and smaller customer businesses to share insights with partners.
Among the issues on stage on day one were cloud cost control, what AI means for channel partners, the evolving cybersecurity opportunity and sustainable power management were.
Highlights included leaders from Suncorp Group, Seek and technology challenger Alex Bank shared their pressing business and technology priorities.
Trevor Clarke presents the Pipeline 100:100
The Tech Research Asia analyst debuted the CRN Pipeline 100:100, an exclusive survey of 100 IT buyers and 100 channel players on their business and IT priorities.
The data-filled presentation was packed with data on a range of pressing issues, from hiring to IT management priorities, cybersecurity state of play and AI use cases and progress.
"Thirteen percent of channel partners say they have customers investing in AI today and another seventeen percent say they have customers in a considerations phase,” Clarke revealed.
“Only seven percent say they don't have any customer looking into AI.”
Suncorp, Seek, Alex Bank and Schneider Electric share customer priorities
Charles Pizzato, Executive General Manager of IT Infrastructure at Suncorp Group, spoke about the company’s journey to the cloud.
Late last year, it was reported that Suncorp had set a “flag on the hill” with its declaration that it intended to exit owned or leased data centres by early 2024. The company is at the tail end of a long-term cloud migration, including to AWS and Azure.
Pizzato spoke about how Suncorp is looking to optimise cloud costs. He also spoke about the company’s need for partners changing as more IT moves to cloud and become more automated and commoditised.
Seek’s Head of Cloud Operations, Adam Daly, told partners how the business is seeking to build its muscle around cloud cost management.
The company has worked with Araza, a finalist in this year’s CRN Impact Awards, on this.
Araza’s Con Gonopoulos, who joined Charles and Adam on stage, noted that “Cloud costs have become the biggest costs in IT besides people costs, and cost control has become a real focus,” Gonopoulos said.
“We look at FinOps around cloud cost management and FinOps foundation frameworks,” he added.
The panellists discussed their journey to the cloud, the role of channel partners in supporting their migration and how IT services providers can rethink their value propositions beyond traditional reseller models as they compete against cloud marketplaces.
Alex Bank strategist John Heaton explained how the company kept IT costs down during its rapid growth, its evolving partner needs, and quantifying the dollar impact of a range of scenarios like a four-hour outage or lapses in different business capabilities.
Schneider Electric's General Manager - Channel, Alliances and Operations, talked about the state of play – and opportunity for the channel – when it comes to businesses need for sustainable IT infrastructure.
“Organisations can’t choose between growth and sustainability anymore; they need to find the balance and partners have a real opportunity to show how technology can help both their finances and their carbon footprint,” Groves.
Groves shared the findings of Schneider Electric’s survey of 900 Australian corporate decision-makers.
She spoke about how partners can support their customers manage rising energy costs, achieve CO2 reduction targets and frame sustainability as a way to grow their business instead of just meeting compliance standards.
Microsoft’s Vanessa Sorenson on cloud-enabled transformation, AI and social impact
Microsoft Global Partner Solutions Director for ANZ, Vanessa Sorenson, said Australian organisations that have moved to the cloud were going through their second round of digital transformations.
She predicted enormous opportunities for channel partners to help end-users harness new, cloud-enabled capabilities.
Channel partners needed to support end-users to harness big data and AI to free their staff from menial tasks and reinvest their time into higher-level operations, Sorenson said.
“We honestly weren't built to carry through with the amount of information we’re getting - emails, texts, who would have thought teams would take off - we’re struggling to churn through it.
“You need to be looking at the ways you are running your business and mining your data, and these new tools are going to build leaders, we now have the compute power to make it work.”
nbn’s Andrew Charitou lays out network landscape in 2023 and beyond
In a sign of how far the conversation about networks, fibre and bandwidth has come, National Manager ICT Channel at nbn Australia, Andrew Charitou, presented a wide ranging view of the issues partners should be considering – from AI to how the nbn is working with the industry and strategic IT advisers, getting the attention of CIOs, drivers of change, the role MSPs play in that change, accessing fibre for Business and the bandwidth that facilitates innovation, and the business nbn ICT Channel Program,
Partners discuss emerging demand drivers
Atturra CEO Stephen Kowal, TribeTech chief software architect Nick Beaugeard and Araza's Con Gonopoulos laid out the opportunities they are seeing in their businesses.
Kowal spoke about a shift in customer priorities from managing IT environments to business process efficiency.
He said Atturra had seen significant demand for information management, with cybersecurity among the drivers.
Beaugeard spoke about TribeTech’s new business World of Workflows, created to seize business automation opportunities.
There is a yawning gap between businesses’ high aspirations when it comes to AI-driven automation, and their delivery capability, in Beaugeard’s view.
Araza’s Gonopoulos noted that while there are many tools available for cloud cost optimisation, he is seeing businesses need help making use of the data – including help translating it for business leaders, and empowering leaders to drive cultural change around cloud FinOps.
Pipeline day one finished with a welcome BBQ hosted by GoTo.
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