What kept the channel up at night in March?

The rapid evolution of AI, the growing demand for top-tier skills and the speed in how business is done were just some of the key concerns facing the IT channel in March.

During the month, ARN spoke with a number of IT decision makers in the Australian IT channel and asked them what keeps them up at night.

For Matt Miller, cofounder and CEO of Insicon, advancements in AI are all well and good, but he feels not enough thought is being placed on the weaponisation of the technology.

“How do we weaponise all these wonderful advancements in technology, and we do it on scale, and without any recourse? That’s petrifying me because we don’t have the tooling on the other side to protect our customers against it and we don’t truly know what those attacks look like with AI creating it,” he said.

“There’s also benefits in a malicious sense as well; you can create any use case you like.

“The other part is that we’re building applications now. There’s always been zero-day [vulnerabilities]; we don’t know the zero days that AI technology is creating in code that could be completely different to anything that we’ve ever seen before.”

As such, Miller added that the OWASP Top 10 — a standard awareness document that lists the most critical security risks to web applications — may be “rendered useless” and in an industry with the prevalence of agentic AI on the rise, there may be a need for a different scorecard altogether.

Also weighing on Miller’s mind is the establishment of adversarial AIs pitted against each other to keep everyone in check.

“We’re in this real, different mindset of what’s real and what’s not; what’s secure and what’s not? There’s no answer to that at the moment, because all our traditional tools have been thrown out the window,” he said.

“So, we really don’t know what we’re building and we don’t know how to secure it.”

Meanwhile, over at DXC Technology, Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ) strategic growth lead for security Craig Griffiths has been worrying about having adequate resourcing and skills across his teams.

“I’ve got a team that’s been absolutely bombarded with pre-sales and solutioning with requests to support sales pursuits; that’s very specific to my role,” he said.

“I need to find either more people or I need to find a way to automate away some of what we’re doing. I need some help.”

One aspect Griffiths needs help with in particular is the training requirements around cyber security, with only so much time in the day available to set aside for it.

“It is hard to keep up with a lot of the training requirements within cyber. It’s always been like that in tech, but security is one step even further,” he said.

“We have our own strategy set, we have our partners that we’re doubling down with and we’re investing in. Partnerships do require an investment; a lot of people will just consider the financial investment, but it’s the time as well.

“We can’t be everything to everyone. We need to find a good balance of what’s needed for our customers and we need to find where we can deliver value to the customer with our partners.

“In regards to skill deficits, everyone’s trainable, but it’s just how fast we need to respond.”

As for what’s been weighing on the mind of DXC’s A/NZ Oracle practice director, Mark Simpson, making sure the business drives focus to deliver on its outcomes and getting the global service provider’s name out into the market are of top concern.

“What gets me down is how do we drive the focus that we need to deliver [our] outcomes? It’s more about the opportunities rather than challenges,” he said.

“I know it’s easy for me to say, but our teams, from a delivery perspective, are second to none. We are unbelievably good at what we do. What probably keeps me awake at night is making sure more people know how great we are and what we do.

“We’re obviously doing a lot of work with sponsorships like Ferrari and Manchester United to help get the [DXC Technology] name known. When we are delivering and where we are providing that platform, from a services point of view, for these organisations to do what they do, it’s incredible.”

When considering the channel, it’s important to note that the industry certainly doesn’t operate in a vacuum. This is all too true for Gartner vice president analyst Luke Ellery, who said he sees concerns surrounding the current geopolitical landscape of the world.

“We’re seeing in Australia quite a lot of signals [indicating] uncertainty, so I think that is keeping organisations up at night, and as a result, I see there being more focus on in the area that I cover: third-party risk management,” he said. “A lot more focus around, ‘Who are the organisations that we’re working with and what geography and what country are they from?’

“You’ve seen it a bit over the last few years, but we’re probably seeing that a little bit more at the moment.”

Vendor views

A number of vendors that operate in the channel shared similar views, with the speed in how they do business consistently coming up.

Andrew Habgood, Elastic’s former vice president of Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) partner ecosystems and current international vice president of partner ecosystems, said that as technology evolves, the vendor’s partners want to adopt new areas.

As such, he feels Elastic has to be “fast enough to keep up with them, to share with them, educate them, inform them and then help them with adopting all these great new things”.

“[The] world is moving so fast that if we don’t capture the attention of the partners and really keep them up to date, we could miss,” he said.

“Now, I think we’re doing a reasonable job, but we need to continually educate, inform and activate our partners in those areas. When we’re engaged, we just see partners leading everywhere.

“They want more — they want to consume more, adopt more, build more, solve more problems.”

Lalit Malik, Oracle’s group vice president and head of alliances and channels for Asia Pacific (APAC), also has speed on the brain, but to provide necessary skillsets.

“All these technologies are hitting us faster than before and you have a very large partner base. Our dependence on that partner base is real and it’s significant,” he said.

“So, to ensure that the partners that we have are skilled on the newer technologies, the changes that are happening and are up to speed to deliver to the customers, … it’s something that needs to be an integral part of strategy and we need to be nimble enough to be able to make that that capability enhancement and change as we move along.”

Coming down to a more local level, Oracle A/NZ general manager of alliances and channels Robert Gosling added his concerns are on the vendor’s engagement model.

“From a technology perspective, we’ve transformed from being an on-premises licenced business to a cloud business, and that is fundamentally a very different way you approach the market, because you’re now offering a cloud service,” he said.

“Just because we’re providing more services, this doesn’t add any value to the customer until there’s am implementation on top of that. I think that changing approach, from being a non-premises sales organisation to actually working with partners and genuinely adding value to the customers, our product capability and their services implementation capability to address the areas of what customers perceive as the price of risk, is critically important.”

Mike Johnson, Zoom A/NZ head of channel, added simply that he’s concerned with not going fast enough.

“I genuinely think there’s a market opportunity of what organisations are looking to do [in] bringing UC and CX together, like leveraging AI. That is something that I truly believe we have a differentiator in that space,” he said.

“Any technology company with a differentiator needs to go and get that into the market. So, I’m constantly looking at ways that I can go faster.”