Forrester Research reports 12-15% of IT channel companies will wash out of the market in the next 5 years. The reason? Failure to adapt to the new era of cloud computing.
A Forrester researcher blog entry shows results from a recent channel company survey.
These results show: there is confusion amongst channel partners over their role in the cloud services value chain; they are not simply waiting for tech vendors to tell them what to do; but they need a lot of help to transform their business models for the cloud computing era.
Not all channel companies will manage to make the transformation (mind, cloud computing will never represent 100% of the technology market). This results in the wash out.
However, as supply (number of channel companies) goes down, demand (for channel partner assets) remains high. Forrester says the new "channel chiefs" will be those tech vendors who make the cloud profitable for their partners.