UK Channel Optimistic About the Year Ahead

Channel Partners expect significant growth in 2021, despite pandemic

  • 63% of respondents expect business growth of more than 5% in 2021
  • 82% rate cybersecurity as the biggest growth prospect for the Channel
  • More than half of respondents identify healthcare as the biggest vertical opportunity

Woking, UK: 22/02/21: 09.00 GMT – European distributor, Nuvias Group, has announced findings from its partner research, revealing 2021’s biggest challenges and opportunities in the Channel:

The majority of Channel partner respondents expect:

  • Significant growth in 2021
  • Cybersecurity to be key to Channel growth
  • Healthcare to be the biggest vertical opportunity

Positive outlook

The Channel has proven robust during the pandemic, confirmed by 69% of partners viewing COVID-19 delays as one of the least important challenges they face. In fact, the Channel has a positive outlook to the year ahead:

  • 63% of respondents expect business growth of more than 5% in 2021
  • Even more noteworthy is that 43% expect more than 10% growth

At what rate do you expect your business to grow over the next year?

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Despite this confident outlook, partners recognise some significant challenges that require support from their distributors if this ambitious growth is to be realised.

Just over a half of respondents (55%) ranked expanding their customer base as their biggest challenge. Competitive bidding was rated as the second biggest challenge (18%), an essential building block for growing your clientele.

As a result, Channel partners are looking for sales support. In fact, Tech Sales (82%) and Marketing (53%) are rated as the most valued areas for support from Nuvias. In such a competitive landscape, concerted sales enablement is important for partners to gain exposure, and to expand their customer base by converting as many opportunities as possible, in the next 12 months.

With the right support in place, where do Channel partners see the biggest opportunities for growth?

Cybersecurity is key

Cybersecurity is considered by far the best driver of growth, with 82% of respondents agreeing that this technology segment offers the biggest opportunity in the Channel. The size of the opportunity is partly the result of the mass shift to remote working during the pandemic, requiring business to secure a much wider, extended network under rising activity from cyber criminals. Cloud security plays an important role in light of the accelerated move to the Cloud, as a result of remote working practices. 74% of partner respondents rated Cloud security as a high growth prospect.

The vertical opportunity

When it comes to vertical market opportunities, the healthcare sector is identified by over half of respondents (63%), as a key growth opportunity. The pandemic accelerated digitisation across many verticals and healthcare organisations are under pressure to digitalise their processes. Partners can offer the support needed and support this transition.

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Digital health is an agreed priority at governmental level, within the wider budget devoted to upgrading  public healthcare; in December 2020, EU4Health announced the most ambitious funding programme for health ever, with €5.1 billion devoted to reinforcing the EU’s healthcare systems (In the UK, the budget was up £52.2 billion from the previous year for 2020/21).

Such provisions will offer improved prospects for Channel partners in this sector. In line with this thinking, just under a third of respondents (33%) recognised the public sector as an area of high growth.

After healthcare, finance (36%) and public sector (33%) are identified as the second and third most significant vertical opportunities for growth. Manufacturing closely followed at 31%.

Identifying the right customers within vertical sectors such as health and manufacturing, was ranked as a key priority (67%), followed by accessing specialist knowledge (55%) and finding a solution tailored to the sector (42%).

The distributor’s role

The research found that distributors need to help partners navigate customer expansion and act on the vertical opportunity. Respondents indicated the most valued services from their distributor to be quick & accurate quotes (80%) and tech assistance (35%), both vital elements in growing one’s customer base.

Distributors play a key role in helping partners realise their ambitions for growth. Through using business intelligence to profiling customers for example, they can match individual resellers with the most appropriate customers and prospects. This provides helpful support in verticals such as healthcare, where partners can be matched to organisations for whom they offer the right skill set and tech stack to deliver real value.

Gordon Lyon, Customer Director, UK&I at the Nuvias Group, commented: “We share our partners’ positive outlook for 2021; our industry has shown resiliency in 2020 – with adversity comes opportunity. It is rewarding to see enthusiasm for the cybersecurity sector, as we have made significant investments in both personnel and value-added services in this area in 2020 and will continue to do so in 2021. We mirror the feedback of our customers in relation to Cloud security, which we also see as a key focus area for 2021.

In line with partners’ need to grow their customer base, we have invested in dynamic business intelligence and reseller acceleration platforms, to help our partners drive more opportunity. Our priority remains to keep collaboration tight with partners as our collective intelligence will help us deliver to fast-changing customer needs”.

Methodology

Nuvias polled key reseller partners across the UK during the last quarter of 2020, including tech VARs, managed service providers, system integrators, and internet service providers – to understand their evaluation of trends, challenges and opportunities in the Channel and to adapt its support accordingly.

About Nuvias Group

The Nuvias Group is the fast-growing European next generation distributor with a broad range of innovative services and solutions designed to secure customer success and accelerate partner and vendor growth. In collaboration with leading technology suppliers, we specialise in providing security, agility and manageability for clients, networks and cloud technology solutions through an ecosystem of highly skilled Channel partners. Discover more at www.Nuvias.com.

 

For further press information, please contact:

Nuvias
Orietta Sutherberry
+44 (0)7741 149 367
[email protected]