Businesses are moving quickly into cloud, AI, and increasingly sophisticated digital environments, but many are still working out how to turn those technologies into practical business outcomes. Research has found that businesses in Australia need specialist skills and knowledge, but skills shortages and hiring difficulties are making those capabilities harder to secure. One survey found that hiring difficulties reduced service quality for 33% of businesses, while others lost customers (32%), missed project deadlines (31%), lost or delayed contracts (27%), or had to decline business opportunities (26%).
For partners, that creates an opportunity — but also a challenge. Customers need someone who can help them decide what to do, how to do it, and how to manage it afterwards.
That is where the combination of Crayon and SoftwareOne comes into focus.
The transition, which will come full circle on 12 October, is not simply about becoming a larger technology organisation. It is about giving partners more capability to solve complex customer problems, while preserving the local relationships, market knowledge, and partner-led model that underpin the channel.
“It’s a strategic next chapter that allows us to bring together the best of both organisations,” says Warren Nolan, Senior Vice President of Channel and Strategy at Crayon, a SoftwareOne company. “The continuity today is an expanded opportunity tomorrow.”
The company’s broadened portfolio spans procurement and IT portfolio management, software asset management and advisory, FinOps, cloud migration and infrastructure, cybersecurity, data and AI, alongside expanded vendor programs and hyperscaler relationships.
This gives partners the capability to move further upstream with customers. A software transaction, for example, can become an opportunity to assess an organisation’s wider IT estate. Cloud migration can lead to FinOps and ongoing optimisation. An AI deployment can open conversations around data governance, security, infrastructure, and managed services.
Nolan sees this evolution as critical to future partner success: “The partners who will win are those that will work their way from being resellers into advisory and management services with outcome-led engagements.”
Vikas Bhonsle, Head of Channel APAC at Crayon, a SoftwareOne company, has seen that progression happen in practice, with partners moving “from being a hardware partner, to a cloud solution partner, to an AI partner” through skilling and enablement.
SoftwareOne’s advisory and managed services can create recurring revenue while allowing partners to capture more value from the customer lifecycle. Nolan describes it as “a deeper vein of profitability” for partner businesses.
The combined organisation brings 20+ years of channel expertise, more than 12,000 employees across 70 countries, 12,000 partners, and more than 1,000 OEM relationships. For an Australian partner, that means access to a broader pool of specialists, vendors, and customers, and opportunities, including the ability to support larger, multi-country engagements.
The value of this model can already be seen among partners in the country. Managed service provider Real World Technology Solutions, for example, has built its reputation on technical excellence. But maintaining specialists within every emerging technology can be difficult for a company of its size. By drawing on its relationships with Microsoft and other technology vendors through SoftwareOne, it can extend the expertise available to customers without stretching its internal resources.
“SoftwareOne’s connection and deep connections with the vendors that SoftwareOne is representing and the tools and the processes they’re working with is really helping us take and tackle problems that, while we might have the skills or we might be able to bring the experience we need in-house to do it, it’s helping us do it in a repeatable and manageable way moving forward,” says Andrew Yeager, Managing Director, Real World Technology Solutions.
IT Service provider, blueAPACHE takes a similar approach. By tapping into expertise in the wider ecosystem rather than building every capability in-house, its team can spend more time helping customers achieve their business objectives and identifying new opportunities.
“SoftwareOne is a key partner of BlueAPACHE in terms of what they bring to the partnership — it’s their expertise and capability and their reach. They are a massive organisation, and that excites me because that means we can leverage more expertise in that organisation that we can bring to our customers,” says Jayati Gulati, Head of Sales, BlueAPACHE.
But access to deeper expertise is not only about drawing on the capabilities partners may not have in-house. SoftwareOne also sees enablement and skilling as a way for partners to build more capability of their own, including developing cloud and AI solutions and creating their own IP. Vikas Bhonsle, Head of Channel APAC at SoftwareOne, has seen that progression happen in practice, with partners moving “from being a hardware partner, to a cloud solution partner, to an AI partner” through skilling and enablement.
This is the kind of partner growth SoftwareOne wants to support at a much larger scale. “We are stronger than ever before to support their growth, support their transformation, help them succeed, help them win more customers,” says Bhonsle.
That support will matter as AI and other emerging technologies reshape the market. “The AI opportunity is real,” Bhonsle says, adding that the ambition is to work with partners to turn that opportunity into solutions in the market.
Find out more on at https://www.softwareone.com/en-au/now/crayon-channel-is-becoming-softwareone-in-apac-partner-update