Techaisle Blog

The narrative surrounding Artificial Intelligence in the workplace is undergoing a seismic shift. For the past several years, the conversation has been dominated by assistive AI—tools that could listen, transcribe, and summarize, acting as diligent but passive scribes. At its WebexOne 2025 event, Cisco signaled the definitive end of that era and the dawn of a new one: the age of Agentic AI. This is not merely an evolution; it is a re-imagining of AI's role from a helpful assistant to a proactive, autonomous "agentic teammate". While the scale of this vision is enterprise-grade, Techaisle analysis indicates that its most profound impact may be felt within the midmarket, where the automation of complex workflows is not a luxury, but a critical engine for growth and competitive advantage.

From Passive Assistance to Proactive Action

Cisco’s core message was a move "from this kind of notion of chat bots that intelligently answered our questions to agents that are going to conduct tasks and jobs almost fully autonomously on our behalf". This transition is the central pillar of its “Connected Intelligence” vision and is embodied by the introduction of five new AI Agents for the Webex Suite. These agents are designed to move beyond reporting on what happened in a meeting to actively participating in the work that follows.

• The Notetaker Agent: This agent captures summaries and action items from in-person conversations using the Webex app or a Cisco device.
• The Polling Agent: It contextually listens to meeting conversations and proactively suggests live polls to gauge team sentiment or gather immediate feedback, eliminating the friction of creating them manually.
• The Task Agent: Going beyond listing action items, this agent can be delegated to complete them—for example, by automatically creating a Jira ticket based on a technical discussion.
• The Meeting Scheduler Agent: This agent intelligently identifies the need for a follow-up, finds a suitable time for all required participants, and even drafts an agenda based on the prior conversation’s context.
• The Receptionist Agent: Leveraging technology from its Contact Center portfolio, this voice-enabled agent can handle routine inbound calls, answer queries, and route customers, acting as an AI-powered automated attendant for Webex Calling.

The Midmarket Perspective: A Productivity Force Multiplier

In a rapidly evolving IT landscape, where complexity is the new constant, technology vendors face immense pressure to deliver not just products, but cohesive and integrated strategies that address real-world business challenges. SUSE recently provided the analyst community with its "State of the Nation" update, offering a detailed look into its strategy, recent momentum, and future direction. The briefing reinforced SUSE's commitment to a four-pillar strategy, with a sharpened focus on integration and addressing critical market imperatives, including AI-driven operations, pragmatic modernization, and digital sovereignty.

At Techaisle, we see this as a pivotal move. SUSE is framing its value proposition not as a collection of open-source components, but as a unified blueprint designed to empower enterprises to innovate anywhere—from the datacenter to the cloud and the far edge—with choice and confidence.

The Four Pillars: An Integrated Stack, Not a Siloed Portfolio

SUSE's strategy is built on four interconnected pillars: Business-Critical Linux, Enterprise Cloud Native, Edge, and AI. While these pillars represent distinct technology domains, the real insight lies in how SUSE is architecting them as a synergistic stack designed to run anywhere, from developer environments to datacenters, the cloud, branch offices, and the edge.

The Channel's Gold Rush: Why Partners Are Pivoting from Profits to Private Equity

The romantic image of the channel partner is the classic bootstrap success story. An engineer or a salesperson starts a business in their garage, growing it through grit and operating profits to build a formidable, self-sustaining enterprise. For decades, this has been the dominant narrative. It is a narrative that is now being aggressively rewritten in the boardrooms of private equity firms.

Techaisle's latest in-depth research, based on a survey of 4,115 partners, has uncovered one of the most profound and disruptive financial transformations in the history of the channel. The long-standing era of patient, self-funded organic growth is giving way to an age of the capital-fueled land grab. An astonishing number of partners are actively seeking external capital, signaling a permanent shift from independent operators to professionally managed, financially sophisticated platforms.

This is not a minor trend; it is a full-scale metamorphosis of the channel's financial DNA. And for technology vendors, it means the very nature of the partners—their motivations, their demands, and their definition of success—is changing overnight. If your channel strategy still assumes you're dealing with that bootstrapped business from the garage, you are dangerously unprepared for the channel of tomorrow.

The Data: A Tsunami of External Capital

Let us look at the raw, undeniable numbers from the Techaisle study. When asked about their business strategy for the next three years, the percentage of partners planning for "Growth by way of raising external capital" nearly doubled in a single year, jumping from 14% to 25%. Conversely, the percentage relying solely on "Organic growth only, funded by operating profits" fell from 46% to 42%. This is a massive movement of strategic intent. But the overall numbers hide the truly explosive story happening within specific partner segments.

The most dramatic shift is among MSPs. Two years ago, only 14% of MSPs were looking to external capital for growth. Today, that number has nearly tripled to a staggering 40%. This is a clear signal that the MSP market, driven by the demand for predictable recurring revenue, has become the prime target for private equity (PE) and other investors. The stand-alone MSP is becoming an endangered species, rapidly being consolidated into larger, PE-backed platforms.

IT Consultants show a similar, dramatic pivot. Their reliance on organic growth plummeted from 55% in 2024 to 46% in 2025, while their pursuit of external capital more than tripled from 7% to 22%. These firms, rich in expertise but often poor in capital, see investment as the only way to scale their services and compete.

Interestingly, VARs appear to be the laggards in this financial revolution, with the lowest percentage seeking external capital (16%) and a continued belief that profits can fund growth. This creates a dangerous strategic divergence: while the rest of the channel is capitalizing to scale, many VARs are sticking to a model that may no longer be viable, making them ripe for either acquisition or obsolescence.

What is Driving the Gold Rush?

This is not happening in a vacuum. Three powerful forces are converging to drive this financial transformation:

1. The Capital Cost of Innovation: Staying relevant today requires massive investment. Building a credible AI practice, a modern cybersecurity operations center (SOC), or a multi-cloud management team requires capital that simply cannot be generated fast enough from operating profits. Partners need outside cash to fund the talent and technology required to compete.
2. The Scale Imperative: The market is consolidating. Small and mid-sized customers are increasingly looking for a single strategic partner who can manage their entire technology stack, from cloud and security to data and AI. This requires a breadth of capabilities that smaller, specialized partners struggle to provide alone. The mantra is "scale or be sold."
3. The Allure of Private Equity: The channel, particularly the MSP segment with its predictable, recurring revenue streams, is incredibly attractive to investors. Private equity firms see a fragmented market ripe for a "roll-up" strategy—acquiring multiple smaller partners and combining them into a larger, more efficient, and more valuable entity. Our research confirms that PE interest is a key factor making external funding more accessible.

Guidance for Vendors: Your Partner is Now a Portfolio Company

The influx of external capital is creating a new breed of channel partner. They are bigger, more professional, more demanding, and they speak the language of EBITDA, not just technology. Your traditional engagement model is not built for this.

1. Your PAM is Now an Investment Banker (Almost): Your Partner Account Managers (PAMs) can no longer just be product experts. They need to understand business finance. They must be able to articulate your value proposition in terms of profitability per client, customer acquisition cost, and lifetime value. The new PE-backed partner leadership will have little patience for conversations that do not connect directly to financial outcomes.
2. Efficiency is the New Loyalty: This new breed of partner is ruthlessly focused on operational efficiency. They are undergoing massive sales process makeovers and investing heavily in automation. Your partner program, portal, and transaction processes must be frictionless. Any administrative burden you place on them is a direct tax on their profitability and will be met with extreme prejudice. They will gravitate toward vendors who are the easiest and most profitable to do business with.
3. Segment for Financial Maturity: Your partner segmentation can no longer be based solely on revenue tiers or certifications. You need a new axis: financial maturity. The needs of a PE-backed MSP platform are fundamentally different from those of a bootstrapped VAR. Your programs, incentives, and support models must be tailored accordingly.

Guidance for Partners: Capitalize or Be Captured

For channel partners, the message is stark. You must have a capital strategy. Hoping to just "keep doing good work" is no longer a viable plan.

1. Professionalize Your Operations: To be attractive to investors—or to compete with those who are investor-backed—you must professionalize. This means implementing formal sales plays (71% of partners do), maintaining pristine data quality in your CRM, and managing your business by the numbers.
2. Maximize Recurring Revenue: Investors buy predictable future cash flow. Your valuation will be determined by the percentage of your revenue that is high-margin and recurring. Every aspect of your business should be geared toward building this base.
3. Choose Your Path: Scale, Specialize, or Sell: You have three choices. You can seek capital to scale and become an acquirer yourself. You can specialize in a niche so deep and profitable that you become an indispensable partner to the larger platforms. Or you can prepare your business to be sold at an attractive valuation. What you cannot do is stand still.

The financialization of the IT channel is the single biggest story of this decade. It will forge a new landscape dominated by fewer, larger, more capable, and more financially demanding partners. This is not a threat; it is an evolution. Vendors who adapt their engagement strategies to this new reality will thrive. Those who continue to manage their channel as a collection of small, independent businesses will find their partner ecosystem acquired out from under them.

For years, the Market Development Fund (MDF) has been the dirty little secret of the channel. A clunky, bureaucratic system of financial exchange where vendors offer funds for "marketing activities" that often have questionable ROI, and partners endure the administrative headache to claim what they see as their rightful due. It has been a cornerstone of vendor-partner programs for a generation. And according to Techaisle's definitive new research surveying 4,115 channel partners, it is a cornerstone that is crumbling into dust.

Techaisle data forecasts a stark reality: MDFs will see a continued decline, shaking up the entire vendor incentives playbook. This is not a cyclical dip; it is a structural collapse. Vendors who are still building their channel engagement strategy around traditional MDF are not just wasting money—they are broadcasting a fundamental misunderstanding of what their partners actually value today. They are investing in a dead paradigm.

The death of the MDF is not about partners wanting less support. It is about them demanding smarter support. The nature of value, growth, and marketing in the channel has irrevocably changed, and the antiquated MDF model is simply not fit for the modern purpose.

Following the Money: What Partners Actually Value